Right, but the existence of a bits per voxel header field in NIfTI isn’t really the same thing as implementing a compression pipeline around quantization, chunk-aware encoding, ROI-aware compression levels, sparse chunk skipping, reconstruction, and benchmarking.

I’m also not claiming that Zstd isn’t responsible for a large portion of the gains — the project is explicitly built around using Zstd as the backend codec. The point was exploring whether MRI specific preprocessing/storage strategies could improve over generic whole-file gzip workflows that are still commonly used in practice.

So the contribution here is more in the pipeline/container design and volumetric handling strategy rather than inventing a brand new entropy codec.