Application
An open source software suite for processing and analysing human brain MRI images
Contributors
Bruce Fischl1, Martin Reuter1, Doug Greve1, Anastasia Yendiki1, Lilla Zollei1, Juan Eugenio Iglesias2
Estimated cost
Free
Progress
Stable release, V 5.3.0 (require registration and license from Massachusetts General Hospital)
FreeSurfer is a software package for analysis and visualization of structural and functional neuroimaging data
FreeSurfer has been developed for post-processing cross-sectional or longitudinal studies employing the following imaging modalities:
- Structural MRI: FreeSurfer provides a full processing stream for structural MRI data, including:
- Skull stripping, B1 bias field correction, and gray-white matter segmentation
- Reconstruction of cortical surface models (gray-white boundary surface and pial surface)
- Labeling of regions on the cortical surface, as well as subcortical brain structures
- Nonlinear registration of the cortical surface of an individual with a stereotaxic atlas
- Statistical analysis of group morphometric differences
- Hippocampus sub-field segmentation
- Dedicated processing and statistics tools for longitudinal data analysis
- Functional MRI: A set of tools for performing functional MRI data analyses on the cortical surface named “FreeSurfer Functional Analysis Stream” (FS-FAST) is provided.
- Diffusion MRI: TRACULA is a tool for automated global probabilistic tractography with anatomical priors.
- PET Partial Volume Correction (PVC) and Kinetic Modeling: PETSurfer is a tool for performing ROI-based, surface-based, and whole-brain analysis of PET data integrated with FreeSurfer anatomical analysis.
- Combining with other modalities: FreeSurfer offers a range of tools for both within-subject and across-subject registration.
FreeSurfer can be controlled from the command line allowing for fully automatized post-processing. Alternatively, it has different graphical user interfaces (GUI) for data visualization, analysis and management.
Publications
Affiliations
1Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard-MIT HST, A.A. Martinos Center, Laboratory for Computational Neuroimaging, Boston, MA, USA
2Translational Imaging Group, Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering Department, London, England