oro.nifti 0.2.0

The latest version of oro.nifti (0.2.0) has been released on CRAN.  New features include:

• Reduced overall size of the package by an additional 50%
• This is a 75% reduction in total from version 0.1.4
  
• Four-dimensional acquisitions are now re-oriented and re-sliced appropriately when converting from DICOM to NIfTI

 Please use the mailing list for any suggestions and/or concerns.

Call for Papers: Special Issue in JSS for "Magnetic Resonance Imaging in R"

We hereby call for the submission of original papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS - http://www.jstatsoft.org)

Magnetic Resonance Imaging in R

 

planned for Summer 2011. The deadline for submission is October 31, 2010.

All MRI modalities are welcome, for example, structural MRI, functional MRI, diffusion tensor or diffusion-weighted imaging, perfusion MRI, pharmacological MRI, and others. Topics of interested include, but are not limited to,

•  New analysis techniques for MRI data and their implementation.
•  The implementation of established MRI analysis techniques.
•  The incorporation of third-party open-source medical imaging software with R.
•  Data management.
•  (Semi-)Automated techniques for quality control.
•  Visualization of medical imaging data and/or modelling results.

All papers will be subjected to the peer-review process, and must comply with the Guide for Authors; see http://www.jstatsoft.org for more details. Please address any comments or inquiries as well as submission of papers to one of the guest editors below.

Sincerely,

Brandon Whitcher and Karsten Tabelow

Guest editors:

Brandon Whitcher
GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Imaging Centre
Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College
London, United Kingdom
email: b.whitcher@imperial.ac.uk

Karsten Tabelow
Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics
Berlin, Germany
email: karsten.tabelow@wias-berlin.de

oro.nifti 0.1.5

The latest version of oro.nifti (0.1.5) has been released on CRAN.  New features include:

• Reduced overall size of the package by 50%
• Minor improvements; for example, the XML package is no longer required as indicated from the DESCRIPTION file

 Please use the mailing list for any suggestions and/or concerns.

oro.dicom 0.2.6

The latest version of oro.dicom (0.2.6) has been released on CRAN. New features/improvements include:

• 33% increase in the speed of DICOM file handling
• Automatic re-orientation/re-slicing of 3D and 4D volumes when converting from DICOM to NIfTI format

Work is underway to incorporate the best features across the different DICOM file-handling programs in multiple R packages.  It's not standardization, but we're on the right path!

Where do you sit? Author position and the h-index

I was recently introduced to the concept of the h-index and was compelled to find out my own h-index via Scopus.  Numbers don't matter, but discussion with my colleagues turned to the issue of author position.  We quickly decided that there are three important "positions" in the list of authors for a publication: first, last and everywhere else (let's call it the middle).  Three-dimensional plots are never easy to deal with, but the concept of the triangle plot has always stuck in the back of my mind.  Armed with this fine plotting mechanism, and the R language, I decided to attack the output from Scopus.

First things first... here is code to parse the .csv output provided by Scopus and calculate the h-index with a simple plot.

Now to deal with the authorship position we first parse the author list, determine where the author of interest is located and then convert the three categories into percentages. I have neglected to include the code that explicitly constructs the matrix A. Just let A = rbind(A, triax.data) to build it up for each author.

I happen to be the red dot in the triangle plot, with four of my colleagues also represented.  With respect to journals in the field of medical imaging and the like, one would want to have as many first or last author positions as possible and fewer middle positions.  First means you did all the work, last means you're the most senior author and (let's face it) nobody cares if you're anywhere else.

So the question is, where do you sit?

oro.nifti 0.1.4

The latest release of oro.nifti (0.1.4) has been released on CRAN.  New features include:

• Added text capability in the (unused) fourth pane in orthographic()
• A vignette is now included (taken from dcemriS4)

oro.dicom 0.2.5

The latest version of oro.dicom (0.2.5) has been released on CRAN.  New features include:

• Added "mosaic" capability when creating 3D arrays from DICOM
• dicomTable() now accepts single DICOM file
• Better handling of SequenceItem tags when reading in DICOM files

Work is ongoing to provide 4D array creation for both single-file and mosaic acquisitions.