The MINC file format is a highly flexible medical image file format
built on the HDF5 generalized data format. The format is
simple, self-describing, extensible, portable and N-dimensional, with
programming interfaces for both low-level data access and high-level
volume manipulation. On top of the libraries is a suite of generic
image-file manipulation tools. The format, libraries and tools are
designed for use in a medical-imaging research environment : they are
simple and powerful and make no attempt to provide a pretty interface
to users.