Colm-

MRIcro should convert Philips PAR/REC. The latest releases will be able to automatically convert and detect both PAR3 and PAR4 format images. It will also correctly sort images (i.e. if you saved them from the scanner without clicking on the 'sort images' checkbox). Furthermore, it will correctly sequence images with more than 4dimensions (e.g. time, echo number, cardiac number, type (e.g. phase and absolute images, directions).

If you contact me, I can also send my console version of the PAR/REC -> NIfTI converter. This can run on Linux and Windows (and should be an easy port form someone to get to Mac), and allows you to either drag/drop or create batch scripts.

Another option would be Paul Morgan's ptoa...
[www.nottingham.ac.uk]

As an aside, I have no idea why Philips ImagExport software always by default wants to save data in an unsorted order.

However, there is one topic where I could use a little help - it would be great if I could find a simple algorithm to convert the PAR/REC image coordinates into a NIFTI spatial transform matrix or a NIFTI quaternion transform matrix. The NIFTI source code includes tools to convert between these, but I am not sure how to convert from the Philips values to the NIFTI ones.
. Angulation midslice(ap,fh,rl)[degr]: 0.00 0.00 -5.04
. Off Centre midslice(ap,fh,rl) [mm] : 0.35 -5.60 -2.92
I think these values, with the addition of the voxel size information should allow a transform similar to the quatern_to_mat44 in nifti_io.c, but I would really appreciate any feedback.

-chris