Very briefly, MINC (Medical Image NetCDF) is built on the general data
format NetCDF (from the UCAR - University Corporation for Atmospheric
Research). When programming with minc, there are a number of levels to
deal with: 

1) NetCDF is the basis of it all, providing a C and Fortran callable
library for accessing data structures in a file at a low-level. Two
applications exist for dumping data to text and converting that text
back into a NetCDF file.  Documentation exists in the form of a NetCDF
User's Guide and of an emacs info page.

2) The low-level MINC library (again C and Fortran callable) is used
with NetCDF routines to do medical-image specific things. It provides
some enhancements to NetCDF (automatic type conversion, for example),
as well as image conversion routines for dealing with image pixel
value issues as well as image size and orientation. Documentation
consists of a programmer's guide and reference (minc_user.tex and
minc_reference.tex in the doc directory).  Example C programs exist
in progs/mincexample.

3) A high-level C library called volume_io provides a Volume data
type, with functions like input_volume to give simple access to data
while handling issues of pixel range conversion and voxel-to-world
coordinate conversion. Documentation consists of a programmer's
reference volume_io/Documentation/volume_io.tex.  Example programs
exist in volume_io/Testing.

4) Generic MINC applications. These will be in the top-level build
directory.  All applications should take the -help option for a
listing of options.  All have man pages.

5) Specific MINC applications like Display and register (for visualization)
and mni_autoreg -- a.k.a. ANIMAL (for registration) are available from
the BIC web page, www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca.


The LaTeX documentation is not built by default.  You can build these
documents using

    cd doc; make docs
    cd volume_io/Documentation; make docs

latex and dvips are required.


Applications that use MINC alone need to #include <minc.h> and
link with "-lminc -lnetcdf -lm".

Applications built with VolumeIO need to #include <volume_io.h>
and link with "-lvolume_io -lminc -lnetcdf -lm".