images_3d.Rmd

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# Three-dimensional images, NIfTI

```{python}
# Our usual set-up
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Set 'gray' as the default colormap
plt.rcParams['image.cmap'] = 'gray'

# Display array values to 4 digits of precision
np.set_printoptions(precision=4, suppress=True)
```

We will spend a lot of time loading data from brain images.

MRI images for functional MRI analysis are usually stored using the [NIfTI
format](https://nifti.nimh.nih.gov/nifti-1).

As you've already seen, this is a very simple format that is typically a
single file with extension `.nii`.  If the file is compressed, it will end
with `.nii.gz` instead.

Inside, the file contains:

* 348 bytes of *header* information.  Among other things, the header
  gives the 3D or 4D shape of the file, and the data type of the pixel
  (voxel) data.
* Usually, directly after the header, we have the image data.  If the image
  data is shape (I, J, K), and S is the number of bytes to store the data for
  one pixel (voxel) value, then the image data is `I * J * K * S` in length.
  For example, the image might be shape 64, 64, 32, and the data type might be
  64-bit float, which is 8 bytes long, so the image data would be
  `64 * 64 * 32 * 8` bytes long.

To load these images into Python, use the [Nibabel](http://nipy.org/nibabel)
package.

Start by importing the Nibabel library:

```{python}
import nibabel as nib
```

We will use the Nipraxis package to fetch the image data file:

```{python}
import nipraxis

structural_fname = nipraxis.fetch_file('ds114_sub009_highres.nii')
structural_fname
```

Load the image into memory:

```{python}
img = nib.load(structural_fname)
img
```

The image has a "header" containing the information about the image:

```{python}
print(img.header)
```

If you happen to have the [FSL
package](https://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki/) installed, you can get the
same information from FSL's `fslinfo`. If you do have FSL, run this command
from the terminal:

```
fslinfo ds114_sub009_highres.nii
```

It is important to have a clear picture of what we are dealing with.
First, we have the NIfTI file, which is a regular file stored in a hard disk with name `ds114_sub009_highres.nii`.
In order to access the contents of the file, we invoked NiBabel's `load()` function.
The call created a Pyton representation (meaning, a Python object) that is capable of understanding the NIfTI format and therefore access the file.
As an example, we printed out the information contained in the header with NiBabel's interface.
The interface has other convenience tools to access information about the image, for instance, the shape of the data grid contained by the NIfTI file:

```{python}
img.shape
```

Think of this as 256 2D images, stacked on top of one another.
Each 2D image is a "slice", of shape (256, 156).

At this point, we haven't accessed yet the actual values that make up this image.
Because we haven't done so yet, NiBabel has not allocated any memory space for it, meaning, data remains sitting in a hard disk and it has not been copied into your RAM (random access memory or fast memory).
When you are ready to visualize or analyze the data, you will need to create such a copy into the fast memory of your machine.

Like the `img.header` property, NiBabel's representation of NIfTI images offers direct access to the data array through its own property:

```
img.dataobj
```

Accessing the data array directly with `img.dataobj` is generally not recommended.
Instead, we can load the image data directly as an array of floating point numbers with `img.get_fdata()`.
Once loaded, we can confirm that now the values in the NIfTI file have been loaded into memory as a Numpy data array, of data type `float64`.

```{python}
data = img.get_fdata()
data.dtype
```

Naturally, we can use all the tooling Numpy offers, for example, to extract summary statistics:

```{python}
print(f"The mean intensity of this image is {data.mean()}, and the standard deviation is {data.std()}.")
```

To get a sense of what a 2D slice looks like, let's visualize the middle slice:

```{python}
middle_slice = data[:, :, img.shape[-1] // 2 - 1]
plt.imshow(middle_slice)
```

We might be interested to look at the histogram of voxel values in this 3D block.
In order to do that, we `np.ravel` the 3D volume to 1D, to throw away the spatial arrangement of the voxels.

```{python}
# Show histogram of the values in the 3D image.
plt.hist(np.ravel(data), bins=100);
```

At a bird's eye view, the extremes of the histogram are the most informative bits.
On the far end, the histogram extends to very large voxel values (a bit above 3000) with very small voxel counts (just a few voxels that are very bright).
On the origin, there's a massive amount of pixels with zero or almost-zero value (corresponding to the background).
Let's plot the histogram corresponding to values above zero to exclude the very large number of zero-valued voxels, and below 1000 to exclude the scarce voxels with very high values.

```{python}
# Show histogram of the values in the 3D image.
plt.hist(data[(data > 0) & (data < 1000)], bins=100);
```

Let us return to the middle slice. As for any array, we can transpose it, to flip the rows and the columns:

```{python}
plt.imshow(middle_slice.T)
```

To get the display you usually see in dedicated imaging display software, we
need to transpose *and* flip up to down:

```{python}
to_display = np.flipud(middle_slice.T)
plt.imshow(to_display)
```

We are looking at a slice *over the third dimension*.  We will sometimes refer
to this as a *plane*.  We can see that the planes are 2D images, where left to
right is the first axis, and back to front is the second axis.

As in [arrays and 3D](arrays_3d), we can think of the 3D image as a stack of
planes, where the bottom plane is the first, then the second is the second
from bottom, and so on:

![](images/image_plane_stack.png)

We can also think of this 3D image as a stack of 2D images where the 2D images are (back to front, bottom to top), like this:

```{python}
yz_slice = data[img.shape[0] // 2 - 1, :, :]
yz_slice.shape
```

```{python}
plt.imshow(yz_slice)
```

Here, we have all the pixels corresponding to 127 in the left to right
direction, giving us an image of shape (156, 256).

![](images/image_plane_stack_row.png)

Here's a coronal slice:

```{python}
xz_slice = data[:, 78, :]
xz_slice.shape
```

```{python}
plt.imshow(xz_slice)
```

![](images/image_plane_stack_col.png)


NiBabel's Python representation of images offers a helpful utility to look at images through three viewplanes, implemented as a function attached to image objects (hence, a *method* of the object):

```{python}
img.orthoview()
```