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mritc

ANALYTICS
Velocity5.0

MRI Tissue Classification

github.com/jonclayden/mritc ↗

A dormant MRI tissue-classification package revived under a new maintainer.

medical-imagingr-packagemaintainer-changedependenciesmodernization
◆Current state
mritc performs MRI tissue classification in R using Gaussian mixture and hidden Markov models. After a long dormancy it changed hands to a new maintainer, and the three releases in this window all land within weeks of each other — two of them seconds apart, a backfill of the handover release alongside the first substantive one. The work so far is modernisation rather than new methodology.
◆Where it's heading
The clear direction is reducing what the package demands of the systems it installs on: heavyweight visualisation dependencies moved to optional, tkrplot dropped entirely, and the default plotting backend switched to a package already present in the dependency tree. A test suite and coverage tooling arrived where there had been none. The remaining releases are CRAN-check fallout from that restructuring, which is the expected shape of a revival.
◆Prediction
Expect further consolidation under the new maintainer — CRAN check fixes and test coverage — before any change to the classification methods themselves.

◆Recent moves

  1. 12d ago

    Buffer overflow and OpenMP name clash resolved

    Fixes a buffer overflow and an OpenMP-related name clash surfaced by CRAN checks. Both are memory- and build-level defects in the compiled code rather than cosmetic issues, so this is corrective work with real reliability consequences. It reads as fallout from the restructuring in the preceding release.

    View source ↗
  2. 23d ago

    Visualisation dependencies made optional, RNifti now the default

    The first substantive release under the new maintainer: lattice and misc3d drop to Suggests, tkrplot is disconnected entirely, and plot.mritc() gains a method argument whose new default uses RNifti — already available through an existing dependency and far easier to satisfy than misc3d. A test suite arrives alongside, with tinytest and covr suggested. This materially lowers the barrier to installing the package.

    View source ↗
  3. 23d ago

    Jon Clayden takes over maintenance; C-level GC protection added

    Records the maintainer handover and the housekeeping that came with it: newly allocated variables are now protected in the C code against garbage-collection problems, documentation URLs move to HTTPS, LazyData is dropped, and long-running examples are wrapped in donttest. Published seconds before the following release, a backfill of the handover into the changelog. The GC protection is the one item here with a real correctness effect.

    View source ↗