2. Requirements

2.1. System Requirements

SPIERSedit has no minimum requirements as such, and will run on most systems; it has, however, not been tested on versions of Windows older than Windows XP. Performance will benefit from high processor speed and a large amount of system RAM; 2Gb is a recommended minimum. As of v2.20, only 64-bit operating systems are supported. Graphics card speed is not relevant (although it is to SPIERSview). A fast hard disk is recommended; SPIERSedit is I/O intensive, and hard-disk speed will be the principle constraint on speed for many bulk-file operations. Large datasets can easily exceed 5Gb in size, so hard disk size may also be an issue.

Mac OSX: OSX 10.5 or higher is required. SPIERSview makes use of the right mouse-button; on single-button Mac OSX systems use the control-click combination to simulate right-clicking.

A high quality optical mouse or digitising tablet is strongly recommended for editing work.

2.2. Data requirements

SPIERSedit can work with any dataset consisting of serial ‘slice’ images, so long as the resolution and scale of each image is the same, and no images are missing from the sequence. Datasets should comprise registered (aligned) serial images, ideally in uncompressed Windows Bitmap (.bmp) format or Portable Network Graphic (.png). SPIERSedit also supports TIIFF (.tif/.tiff) and JPEG (.jpg) format; JPEG datasets are not recommended as JPEG compression causes artefacts which can degrade data and hence final models.

Format: Images can be 8-bit grayscale (.png, .bmp, .tiff) or 24-bit colour (.bmp, .png, .jpg, .tiff). Images that lack colour information (e.g. CT data) should be converted to an 8-bit rather than 24-bit format – you will not see a difference visually, but the software will run substantially faster.

Names and directory: Although SPIERSedit will load any file sequence in alphabetical/numerical order, for clarity it is recommended that images should be serially numbered with three or four digits before the file extension (e.g. 0001.bmp, 0002.bmp etc). Images must all be in the same directory (called the working directory subsequently). If the dataset has been prepared using SPIERSalign, this will be the ‘cut’ directory underlying the SPIERSalign working directory. Note that changing filenames once the dataset has been created will effectively corrupt SPIERSedit’s data.

Size and cropping: Images can be any size (resolution), but a key restriction is that all images in the sequence must be the same resolution. The speed of many SPIERSedit operations will be proportional to resolution; cropping of the image sequence before loading into SPIERSedit is hence strongly recommended. SPIERSalign can be used to perform this croppping, and hence it is normal to pass even pre-registered data (e.g. from a CT scanner) through SPIERSalign before loading into SPIERSedit. Note that once editing work in SPIERSedit has begun it is not possible to re-crop images without all work being lost.