GIPL (Guys Image Processing Lab) is a image file format, developed at the Guy's Hospital (in London), which is related to the King's College London School of Medicine and Dentistry.

The format is used for instance in ITK-SNAP, MEDINRIA and some other ITK Toolits. Yet it is not widespread.

We plan to support it and give out exceptions when trying to save inappropiate images in this format.

Description of the format: (http://www.colin-studholme.net/software/rview/rvmanual/fileform.html)

UMDS GIPL format files (extension '.gipl') are recognised and loaded. Each image volume is stored in a single file consisting of a 256 byte header followed by binary voxel data values. However only 16 and 8 bit (signed and unsigned) data types are supported (each of these are converted to signed 16 bit values internally).
Header value support includes:

Number of Pixels, Slices and Frames.
Voxel Dimensions.
Max and Min Data Values used to initialize colour lookup table for display.
Multiple Frame Images (t>1).

WARNINGS:

  Slice orientation is currently assumed to be TRANSAXIAL.
  If Max and Min are wrong then the display will be incorrect on loading.
  If Max<Min then the data volume is scanned and Max and Min set from the Data Values.

Currently the following data types in GIPL format are supported:

  16 bit signed and unsigned integer (short)
  8 bit signed and unsigned (char)
  32 bit integer (int)
  32 bit floating point (float)

All these types are converted to internal 16 bit signed numbers inside rview.
An auto scaling is applied to floating point numbers: please be careful when loading
floating point data with a large or small data range into rview.