Saving The View....

Rview is simply a tool for viewing multi-modality image data files in a common co-ordinate system. It may be the case that a particular display location and configuration is useful in interpreting the data (e.g. seeing a tumour or region of activation). In such cases it is useful to be able to save the view to look at later. The most basic approach is to simply dump the display window to a conventional colour image file (e.g. windows bitmap). This can be done using the option:

This will display a filer window allowing the destination folder/directory and filename to be specified.
Note: The saved file will be a 32 bit microsoft bitmap file (some software does not load this easily and you may need to convert it).

An alternative is to copy the current window contents as an image to the clipboard using this 'copy to clipboard ' option. By Switching to other applications such as Word or Power point, the user can then select 'paste' in this destination application to import rview window contents.

Saving View Setup

A more useful alternative is to save the entire STATE of rview so you can return to the same location in the image volumes with the same display settings, window size, colours etc. at a later date and continue examining the data. This can be thought of as a 'volume browsing' facility and to do this use the option:

This creates an rview file (with extension .rvw) which is a text file that records the internal state of rview which includes:

Paths to all the raw data files displayed
Colour tables and display settings
Current transformation estimates

Once this file has been created this display setup may be reloaded at any time by simply dragging the required '.rvw' file onto the rview display window. This provides an efficient way of recording many medically useful views of volume data in only a few kilobytes of text file.

Note: Because these setup files contain paths recoding the location of the raw data files relative to the setup file, it is important that the raw data files are not moved! It is best to 'package' the files so that the image data files are collected in a subject folder (with say subfolders for MRI and CT and PET and SPECT etc) together with a sub folder for rview setup files. In this case rview will record a relative path to the image data, within the subject folder, and then the folder containing each modality and setup file can be moved or copied together without breaking the setup file: If all else fails it is possible to simply edit the '.rvw' text file (using wordpad') to fix/modify the internal reference to image data.

The first few lines of a setup file look something like the text below, where Image 0 and Image 1 point to MRI and PET data to be loaded into the 'Reference Image' and 'Floating Image A' respectively.:

!RVSetup
Image: 0 ..\MRIFolder\mri.hdr 34 155 0 1.000000 1.000000 0
Image: 1 .\PETFolder\pet.hdr 500 1000 0 1.000000 1.000000 0
NormVal: 0 1.000000 0.000000
NormVal: 1 1.000000 0.000000
Flags: 1000 1
WinPix: 950 602
VMODE: 581
Ratio: 0.500000
Snaping: 0
RenderLight: 1.000000
RegGrowWidth: 15
RenderLightPlane: 0.100000
RenderOpts: 4 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000
Render2Opts: 0 2
Render3Opts: 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000 0
Render4Opts: 2
Trans2Sys: 0 15
0.000000
0.000000
0.000000
.....

..... lots of other stuff !