There are the two most popular imaging types, that is DICOm and NIfTI, although we also have other file types such as PAR/REC images, Analyze images, and NRRD images.
DICOM
It stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. hese are the is the standard representation of images and the format of files that you’d expect to get right of a scanner or from a hospital archive. These hospital archives are called PACS systems and that stands for picture archiving and communication systems. There are two components to a DICOM image:
- Image data which will be in pixels.
- a header which is meta data about the image
You can think of this as a JPEG image with a text file. Where the JPEG image will be your image data in the pixels and the text file will be your header.
NIfTI
NIfTI stands for Neuroimaging Informations Technology Initiative. It’s a standard representation of images, and it’s the most common used type of analytic file. NIfTI is a way to look at objects as 3D images in art and with other neural imagining software.
Difference between DICOM and NIfTI
The PAR/REC files are files from a Phillips scanner. So subjects that are scanned on a Phillips scanner will have a PAR/REC file as opposed to a DICOM file.
There’s also ANALYZE files, and these are what NIfTI files were originally based on, but they have a separate header and image, and so the NIfTI files kind of are an improvement on that because there’s only one file that you need to deal with. Then we have the nearly raw raster data, or the NRRD. Which is another less common format but most imaging software can read nrrd.
