Week 5 research - Image J

A quick search revealed that image J supports "bitmap stacks".
So more research follows:

"ImageJ can display multiple spatially or temporally related images in a single window. These image sets are called stacks. The images that make up a stack are called slices. In stacks, a pixel (which represents 2D image data in a bitmap image) becomes a voxel (volumetric pixel), i.e., an intensity value on a regular grid in a three dimensional space."

Stacks are stored in RAM - Virtual Stacks are stored on the disk, and are read only, bu there are work arounds. TIF Virtual stacks can be accessed faster then JPG virtual stacks
JPG can be converted to TIF.

TIF is the Native format of imageJ:

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is the ‘default’ format of ImageJ
Images can be 1–bit, 8–bit, 16–bit (unsigned1), 32–bit (real) or RGB color. 
TIFF files with multiple images of the same type and size open as Stacks or Hyperstacks. 

ImageJ opens lossless compressed TIFF files (see II Image Types: Lossy Compression and Metadata) by the LZW, PackBits and ZIP (Deflate/Inflate) [2] compression schemes. 

In addition, TIFF files can be opened and saved as ZIP archives. Tiff tags and information needed to import the file (number of images, offset to first images, gap between images) are printed to the Log Window when ImageJ is running in Debug Mode (Edit.Options.Misc..., see Settings and Preferences).

DICON also supported:

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is a standard popular in the medical imaging community.

Support in ImageJ is limited to uncompressed DICOM files.

DICOM files containing multiple images open as Stacks. Use Image.Show Info... [i] to display the DICOM header information.

A DICOM sequence can be opened using File.Import.Image Sequence... 

or by dragging and dropping the folder on the ‘ImageJ’ window. 

Imported sequences are sorted by image number instead of filename and the tags are preserved when DICOM images are saved in TIFF format. 

ImageJ supports custom DICOM dictionaries, such as the one at http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/download/docs/DICOM_Dictionary.txt. 

More information can be found at the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging. 

http://www.cabiatl.com/mricro/dicom/index.html

Tiff bitmapstacks can be "flattened " with a montage feature under the stacks menu

Chapter 12 of the Manual is on Volumes