Proposals:Slice contiguous images

Slice contiguous images

ITK uses a contiguous image memory model. All the pixels in an image/volume are in a single contiguous memory block. Many existing medical image analysis systems use a slice contiguous memory model. Here, all the pixels in a slice are in a contiguous memory block but the slices may not be contiguous in memory. A slice contiguous memory model has benefits over a volume contiguous memory model in memory management and cache coherency. ITK should consider adding an ability to operate on slice contiguous volumes. This will require modification to the image iterators and anywhere Image::GetBufferPointer() is called.