1. What is Slices?
2. What do I need to run Slices?
3. How do I download Slices?
4. How do I install Slices?
5. How do I uninstall Slices?
6. How do I ask questions about Slices?
7. How do I find out about updates to Slices?
8. Credits

Slices is a simple but powerful graphical program for visualizing volume images, such as stacks of registered 2-D images.

Slices displays arbitrarily oriented two dimensional planes, or slices, of a three dimensional volume. A tightly integrated set of navigation tools allows fast and intuitive "movement" through volume data.

Visualization of volume information is difficult because only a small portion, or disconnected subsets, of a volume can be viewed at one time. One common technique, surface rendering, extracts relevant surfaces from a volume and displays them as if they were physical objects. While often useful, surface rendering falls short if the surfaces are highly convoluted or nested, or if significant textures and features are not represented well by surfaces. Volume images of the human brain demonstrate this complexity: most detail is lost in renderings of any one set of surface approximations.

Slices exploits our vision's remarkable sensitivity to smooth motion, and our capacity to integrate short term visual memory of forms, for the perception of volumes. By rapidly and repeatedly displaying a sequence of adjacent slices we can form a robust mental representation of complex interior features. And by smoothly rotating the slice plane about a point of interest, the context of a region can be quickly recognized.

So while a surface rendering might show a loaf of bread much as you would normally see it, perhaps with an end cut off, Slices allows motion through the loaf, allowing you to perceive how the subtle swirl of the texture's orientation changes throughout the loaf.

Slices is not a volume image editor, but there are tools for control of the view (e.g. magnification, brightness/contrast, interpolation), and volume management (e.g. simple resampling, editing auxilliary volume information, creating volumes from sets of 2-D images). It also can save any slice to a standard image format, and includes full documentation.

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Data: In addition to the above system requirements for running Slices, you will also need a volume image or a set of registered 2-D images. You can either use a sample volume supplied by ScaleSpace (a small sample volume comes packaged with Slices), or provide one of your own. If you do the latter, you'll need to continue reading.

Currently, Slices only recognizes a single volume file format. It can also load sets of registered 2-D images of any common image format. Reading raw data from a general format and recognizing a few common volume formats (e.g. Analyze) will soon be added to Slices' capabilities.

The sample volumes are in a simple format called "Slices Volume", usually with the extension ".vol". The files contain a description of the volume followed by uncompressed value data. Slices saves new or altered volumes to this format.

If you want to view your own volume data, there are two options:

1. Save each plane as an image, with the file name including the plane number (e.g. Name1.tif , Name2.tif, ...), and load these into Slices using File | Load Serial Images.
   
   
2. Read the "Slices Volume" format specification, and write your volume to a file that conforms to this specification.

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Send a message to Mark Dow, mark@scalespace.com

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Send a message to Mark Dow, mark@scalespace.com requesting that you be put on the Slices-Update mailing list.

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