What is XML/REC?

Philips has made a successor for it's PAR/REC format that fixes many of it's shortcomings and should be easier to parse than it's old plain-text counterpart: XML/REC
This XML/REC format has been used for quite some years in the Philips scanners already, but there are virtually no tools that read (or convert) this format.

Why?

I think it would be of great benefit if Nibabel would support reading from these files, and perhaps even saving back again to this format. Especially since XML/REC's are used in the PRIDE research tool of the Philips software that allows for automatic processing (analyzing, converting, shimming, custom pulses) on the scanner host itself.

How hard would it be?

The REC part of the XML/REC format is identical to it's PAR/REC counterpart. The header is in XML format (obviously) and contains roughly the same data as the plain-text PAR files.

My part in this

I would like to aid the implementation of this format and can provide:

• Different types scans in all the formats that the Philips software supports (XML/REC, PAR/REC, DICOM (classic and enhanced), NifTI (1, 2 and FSL))
• A XML to PAR header conversion Python script, provided by Philips itself that has an GPLv3 license
• Time to attempt implementing this myself. Even though it might not be completely up to your desired code quality, it could help?
• (possibly) an (very rough) Matlab implementation for reading and writing XML/REC files

Thanks for help!