The bshort Volume Format
The contents below are copied from http://airto.bmap.ucla.edu/BMCweb/HowTo/FileFormats.html
1.0 Overview
bshort files contain blocks of signed short integers representing the image data, and have a small, very short, header that specifies the number of pixels in each of (only)three dimensions, usually interpreted as Y, X and time. Multiple slice locations are generally represented by increasing the y dimension to make a vertical stack format.
The bshort file format is lossless in intensity information as compared to the scanner native formats, and is somewhat easier to manage, with the caveats listed below.
2.0 File names
Files are named freely, but must end in .bshort and must have a matching header file that ends in .hdr
3.0 Other notes
Occasionally (often, in fact) we save files in the bshort format with multiple slice locations arrayed in a tiled format. e.g., sixteen slices are saved in a four by four array. Although this appears nice on the screen, it is a messy format, as the header contains no specification for the number of slice locations, and each multi-slice collection must be treated as a single image.