MINC

General description
This page describes the MINC (Medical Imaging NetCDF) file format, a medical imaging data format and an associated set of tools and libraries initially created by Peter Neelin at the [| Montreal Neurological Institute]. It is now developed by an international group of researchers who maintain an interest in such things. The MINC2 format is based upon HDF5 and MINC1 upon netCDF, the switch to HDF5 was motivated by support for large datasets (~1TB histology) and block compression. The format is described at http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/ServicesSoftware/MINC.

Software
The file format can be created, read and manipulated using the libminc Library and minc-tools packages. There are also many other packages available for specific image analysis tasks, these are generally focussed on the analysis of MRI data.

Development is on github:

https://github.com/BIC-MNI

Documentation and information is on wikibooks

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MINC

Official downloads (releases) are here:

http://packages.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/tgz

Sample files
Some sample MINC files are available in the mni-atlases packages here: http://packages.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/tgz

Identification
The file extension is .mnc and the MIME Type is application/x-minc ??.