.flf files?

[jonnylane]

Hi all,

I'm working on a project as part of my job that invoves data aquisition from medical images. The xray film scanner has a specific piece of software that saves the scanned images as .flf files. I can't find out much about them.

I have a TWAIN plugin for paintshop pro that allows me to operate the film scanner through psp, but I'm not allowed to because its apparently 'clinically unstable'. Whatever.

I have played about with the flf files in matlab, and when i read it in its a 1d array. uh oh.

I need to be able to convert to .jpg or something a bit more mainstream.

Any suggestions?

[Zao]

Do you have a sample file for people to try their magic on?

[TransformX]

I had once a software that did fractal compression of pictures.
The file 'format' was fif.
I hope it helps.

[jonnylane]

oops

[TransformX]

Originally posted by jonnylane
oops

???

[Tempest]

I only found out that it's an "flat image" file. What they exactly mean by "flat" here is beyond me. Is the file a binary or a text file? (Depending on the machine you used to acquire the images the exact format of those may vary, but what does it look like?)

It should, in any case, be quite a simple file with a simple data structure and probably no data compression. It might have a header that informs about the file dimensions and the color format (color depth/grayscale?) used. Then there should be either (in a text file) rows of values, or (in a binary file) sets of data points.

Anyway, the only software that I found that will definitely do the trick is Image-Pro, but that's probably "a little" expensive... And even then, I think you might have to mess with some scripts and/or input the file parameters by hand (width, height, BW/color etc.)

[VJ]

Image Eye:

http://www.fmjsoft.com/

They have support for nearly all formats, including:
FIF: Iterated Systems Fractal Image File format.
And best of all: a trial version (to see if it is indeed this format)

I also found .flf:

http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/reference/fext/fextf.htm

but it is said to be Corel Paradox, which seems strange for a scanned image...

Jörg

[Tempest]

It's FLF we're talking about, not FIF.

But my bottom line is, if the file format is as simple as I suspect (are the files huge? If they are it's a good sign) and if you can supply the dimensions and color scale used along with some sample files then pretty much any half-assed C programmer could write you a conversion utility to BMP or whatever.

[Zao]

Making your own app to quickly convert the format to some nicer like BMP or so wouldn't be that hard.
But that depends if on if you know how to program of course

[VJ]

Originally posted by Tempest
But my bottom line is, if the file format is as simple as I suspect (are the files huge? If they are it's a good sign) and if you can supply the dimensions and color scale used along with some sample files then pretty much any half-assed C programmer could write you a conversion utility to BMP or whatever.

Yes, that is true...

Some things that might help: source is an X-ray scanner, so the images are likely to be grayscale. As it concerns medical imaging, the probably will be no compression. If you know the dimensions (in pixels) of what you scanned, you can determine if they use one or two bytes per pixel.

You could try renaming the extension to .raw, and then try using some photo-editing software (I don't remember which programs, but some have import-settings that let you input the size, number of colours and some other values).


Jörg

[Paddy]

give me a shout if i can help Jon

[Wombat]

You could probably write a quick interpreter in Perl - <I>pack</I> and <I>unpack</I> will do 90 percent of the conversion work, likely. The TWAIN plugin can probably help you: PSP can tell you the dimensions of an image, and you can use it to decode the FLF.

Open the FLF file in a hex editor of some type, and there's likely to be useful information in the beginning. Medical images are often designed with DICOM guidelines in mind.

Also, don't make any firm assumptions on color depth. I've seen all sorts of numbers there.