The DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format, and BIDS
(Brain Imaging Data Structure), which extends NIfTI, can both encapsulate
copious amounts of metadata about a scan and the patient. This metadata can
be useful for more advanced or research-focussed post-processing methods,
and standard R attributes are a natural place to store it. The
imageAttributes
function returns a list of just these extended
attributes, if they exist, ignoring other attributes used by the package.
The replacement form allows this metadata to be modified or removed. These
functions currently only act on objects inheriting from the
niftiImage
class.