I’m a software developer collaborating with a researcher who wants to use AFNI to perform some pre-processing tasks on our data sets before importing them into my MATLAB-based application. Thus, I’ve been tasked with adding support for AFNI’s file format to my application. He provided me with the afni_utils package and I’ve been looking into using the BrikInfo and BrikLoad functions to obtain the images and metadata from the AFNI .HEAD and .BRIK files. However, I am used to working with DICOM files and their associated nomenclature. I have not previously worked with the AFNI file format and am uncertain how to interpret the various data fields that I obtain as output from the BrikInfo function. Is there a reference document available that goes into some detail explaining how to interpret these data fields? I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction to a Rosetta Stone for the AFNI nomenclature. Below is some example output from applying the BrikInfo function to our data:

info = 

struct with fields:

RootName: 'E:\datasetname\afni\DCE+orig'
DATASET_DIMENSIONS: [128 128 52 0 0]
DATASET_RANK: [3 473 0 0 0 0 0 0]
BRICK_TYPES: [1×473 double]
BRICK_STATS: [1×946 double]
BRICK_FLOAT_FACS: [1×473 double]
BYTEORDER_STRING: 'LSB_FIRST'
ORIENT_SPECIFIC: [0 2 4]
ORIGIN: [-215.2300 102.7872 -107.4927]
DELTA: [2.0313 -2.0313 3]
BRICK_LABS: []
BRICK_KEYWORDS: []
SCENE_DATA: [0 2 0 -999 -999 -999 -999 -999]
TYPESTRING: '3DIM_HEAD_ANAT'
TAXIS_NUMS: [1×8 double]
TAXIS_FLOATS: [1×8 double]
TAXIS_OFFSETS: []
IDCODE_STRING: 'XYZ_TX7bzwqsauFXKajc5ynEVw'
IDCODE_DATE: 'Wed May  5 09:24:38 2021'
BRICK_STATAUX: []
STAT_AUX: []
HISTORY_NOTE: '[username@hostname: Wed May  5 09:24:38 2021] 3dcopy S07_DCE.nii.gz DCE+orig'
NOTES_COUNT: []
NOTE_NUMBER_001: []
TAGALIGN_MATVEC: []
VOLREG_CENTER_OLD: []
VOLREG_CENTER_BASE: []
VOLREG_ROTPARENT_IDCODE: []
VOLREG_ROTPARENT_NAME: []
VOLREG_GRIDPARENT_IDCODE: []
VOLREG_GRIDPARENT_NAME: []
VOLREG_INPUT_IDCODE: []
VOLREG_INPUT_NAME: []
VOLREG_BASE_IDCODE: []
VOLREG_BASE_NAME: []
VOLREG_ROTCOM_NUM: []
IDCODE_ANAT_PARENT: []
TO3D_ZPAD: []
IDCODE_WARP_PARENT: []
WARP_TYPE: []
WARP_DATA: []
MARKS_XYZ: []
MARKS_LAB: []
MARKS_HELP: []
MARKS_FLAGS: []
TAGSET_NUM: []
TAGSET_FLOATS: []
TAGSET_LABELS: []
LABEL_1: 'zyxt'
LABEL_2: 'zyxt'
DATASET_NAME: 'zyxt'
DATASET_KEYWORDS: []
WORSLEY_DF: []
WORSLEY_NCONJ: []
WORSLEY_FWHM: []
TypeName: 'short'
TypeBytes: 2
ByteOrder: 'ieee-le'
Orientation: [3×2 char]
FileFormat: 'BRIK'
Extension_1D: ''

Thanks,
-Matt