MINC Structural Attributes

Many MINC attributes are used to describe the types of variables and the relationships among variables.

These variables are considered ``structural'' in the sense that they convey no useful information about the medical image stored in the MINC file, but instead serve to support the MINC format itself.

Each of these attributes should be considered mandatory for any MINC standard variable, with the following exceptions: The signtype attribute is required only for variables of integral type, and the parent and children attributes are required only for variables of class group or var-attribute. They are not used for variables of class dimension or dimension-width.

• vartype - String identifying the type (or class) of the variable. It must be one of ``group________'', ``dimension____'', ``dim-width____, or ``var_attribute''.
• varid - String which identifies the variable's relationship to the MINC specification. All MINC standard variables should set this attribute to ``MINC standard variable''. Non-standard variables may either ignore this attribute or set it to some other string value.
• signtype - Because MINC, unlike NetCDF, differentiates between signed and unsigned integral types, this attribute is required to define the format of variables which store data of an integral type. The only legal values are either the string ``signed__'' or the string ``unsigned''. For 8-bit integers, the default is unsigned, for all other integer types the default is signed__.
• parent - String identifying by name the parent variable of this variable. If the string is empty (of length zero), the variable is at the root of the hierarchy.
• children - List of the names of the variables which are considered children of this variable. The list is separated by newline characters.
• version - String identifying the version of this variable. In MINC 1.0, this string is always set to ``MINC Version 1.0'' for MINC standard variables.