[chimerax-users] Stack thickness question and cine playing?

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Jason,
Ah, I hadn't realized from the initial question that this was DICOM data, although of course it makes sense given your area of research.  There are likely some ChimeraX bugs and misinterpretations reading in the data, as the DICOM functionality has not been as thoroughly exercised as features for working with atomic density maps.

So I see 1000 planes, and I think they are just all getting put into one big stack instead of 25 separate stacks (time points). If so, it might be fixable by changing all the filenames so that they reflect time point, and end in image file suffix (e.g. .tif if that's what the DICOMs contain)... but I would have to investigate further and get back to you. Maybe there is metadata in each of the .dcm files that marks the different time points and slice numbers, and if so, it would be nice to improve our DICOM reader to understand this so that renaming would not be required.

I still don't know why the orthoplanes axes don't seem aligned, however.  ChimeraX may just be confused about this data.

I will share internally with a few experts on our team with the understanding that this data should remain private, and we will get back to you with any solutions we find.

Sorry about the difficulties -
Elaine

> On Feb 25, 2022, at 10:50 AM, Elaine Meng via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Jason!
> 
> With (1), I'm not sure what is happening... from the orthoplanes image you sent, one guess is that the 3 axes of the data are not along X,Y,Z and so a larger XYZ box is shown.  Or maybe the slices are placed too far apart, which may be defined (or misinterpreted from) the input files.  Or if you simply meant that the scale of the data is wrong, that can be reset with the "volume" command "voxelSize" option.  
> 
> I understand that this may be private data, but if there is example data you can share, it would help in defining and possibly solving this problem.  You could send it to just me rather than chimerax-users if that helps.
> 
> (2) If the data are recognized as a volume series, then the series can be played with a slider or the "vseries" command.  What kinds of data can be recognized and how to specify that are described here:
> <https://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/trajectories.html>
> 
> I hope this helps,
> Elaine
> -----
> Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
> UCSF Chimera(X) team
> Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
> University of California, San Francisco
> 
>> On Feb 25, 2022, at 9:16 AM, Rubenstein, Jason via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users at cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Hi!  Two questions:
>> 
>> 	• This 3D dataset is only about 30 mm thick in the Z direction.  When ChimeraX is displaying it, it shows the thickness about 50x too thick.  Any way to adjust this?
>> <image.png>
>> 
>> 	• this is a "4D" dataset, with 20 phases of 3D stacks.  Any way to "play" the cine?
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> Jason Rubenstein, M.D.
>> Codirector, Cardiac MRI
>> Associate Professor, Medical College of Wisconsin
>