Unusual Space-Saving Decisions

For reference, an MR image tends to be about 256kb per slice in size, give or take a factor of about 4, with the number of slices generally on the order of a dozen--so let's say that there are about 3MB to a series (with several series usually acquired for each patient).

Now, given all of that, why would GE choose to try and compress a dozen flags into two bytes of data in the header section of the raw data files?