I would like to thank all people who have responded to
my inquiry re. the SCF -> ABI conversion. I am posting
a summary, because others may be interested too. For
privacy reasons, I am omitting the names of the respondents.
One of the respondents pointed out to the fact that
no SCF -> ABI conversion is possible, because there is a loss
of information in the ABI -> SCF conversion. I did not know
about that. I assumed that the ABI -> SCF conversion is
a straight-forward and reversible compression. If not,
could someone post a reference to a paper describing what it is.
I used to work in the area of medical imaging. For legal
reasons, they do not use any irreversible compressions.
Another respondent tried to guess why I needed the SCF -> ABI
conversion. The reason is prosaic. I have a program that
checks the quality of the lane files and then calls makeSCF.
A specific lane gave me a problem, but now I cannot re-run
my program, because the lane file no longer exists in ABI format.
Another respondent informed me that he had worked on this very
project, but he did not complete it. He asked me if, in my opinion,
the project was worth completing. I think it will be useful to
the community as a nice addition to makeSCF.
Eugene Veklerov
