So I am writing custom dataset for medical images, with .nii (NIFTI1 format), but there is a confusion.
My dataloader returns the shape torch.Size (1,1,256,256,51) . But NIFTI volumes use anatomical axes, different coordinate system, so it doesn’t make any sense to permute the axes, which I normally would with volume made of 2D images each stored separately in local drive with 51 slice images (or depth), as Conv3D follows the convention (N,C,D,H,W).
so torch.Size (1,1,256,256,51) (ordinarily 51 would be the depth) doesn’t follow the convention (N,C,D,H,W) , but I should not permute the axes as the data uses entirely different coordinate system ?
In pytorch 3d convolution layer naming of the 3 dimensions you do convolution on is not really important (e.g. this layer doesn't really have a special treatment for depth compared to height). All difference is coming from kernel_size argument (and also padding if you use that). If you permute the dimensions and correspondingly permute the kernel_size parameters nothing will really change. So you can either permute your input's dimensions using e.g. x.permute(0, 1, 4, 2, 3) or continue using your initial tensor with depth as the last dimension.
Just to clarify - if you wanted to use kernel_size=(2, 10, 10) on your DxHxW image, now you can instead to use kernel_size=(10, 10, 2) on your HxWxD image. If you want all your code explicitly assume that dimension order is always D, H, W then you can create tensor with permuted dimensions using x.permute(0, 1, 4, 2, 3).
Let me know if I somehow misunderstand the problem you have.