• DownloadAndInstall

This page takes you through all the steps necessary for downloading & installing FreeSurfer but lacks the detail and options presented throughout the DownloadAndInstall wiki.

FreeSurfer System Requirements

Summary of Requirements:
Operating System: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows (via VirtualBox)
Processor Speed: 2GHz at least
RAM: 8GB recommended
Graphics card: 3D graphics card with its own graphics memory & accelerated OpenGL drivers
Size of installation package: 8.5GB
Typical size of a processed subject: 370MB
Tutorial dataset size: 18GB
Other requirements: Matlab (only needed to run FS-FAST, the fMRI analysis stream)

Download

Freesurfer 5.3 stable release (ReleaseNotes)

Important Note: It is essential to process all your subjects with the same version of FreeSurfer, on the same OS platform and vendor, and to be completely safe, even the same version of the OS.

Development Version:
The most recent build of FreeSurfer can be download from here.

Installation

Linux:

Installing freesurfer on Linux systems involves simply extracting the contents of the .tar.gz file somewhere on your machine. Installing into the directory /usr/local is recommended. For example:

$> tar -C /usr/local -xzvf freesurfer-Linux-centos6_x86_64-stable-pub-v5.3.0.tar.gz

Mac:

Installing freesurfer on Mac systems involves simply double clicking the .dmg file and clicking thru the steps. The default installation location is in the /Applications directory. For more detailed instructions, please see the following step-by-step.

Setup & Configuration

To begin using FreeSurfer, you must define and evironment variable called FREESURFER_HOME which is set to the location FreeSurfer was installed, and then source the setup script:

Linux:

## bash
$> export FREESURFER_HOME=/usr/local/freesurfer
$> source $FREESURFER_HOME/SetUpFreeSurfer.sh

## tcsh
$> setenv FREESURFER_HOME /usr/local/freesurfer
$> source $FREESURFER_HOME/SetUpFreeSurfer.csh

Mac:

export FREESURFER_HOME=/Applications/freesurfer
source $FREESURFER_HOME/SetUpFreeSurfer.sh

Is done correctly, you should see output similar to this:

Setting up environment for FreeSurfer/FS-FAST (and FSL)
FREESURFER_HOME /usr/local/freesurfer
FSFAST_HOME     /usr/local/freesurfer/fsfast
FSF_OUTPUT_FORMAT nii
SUBJECTS_DIR    /usr/local/freesurfer/subjects
MNI_DIR         /usr/local/freesurfer/mni

License

A license key must be obtained to make the FreeSurfer tools operational. Obtaining a license is free and comes in the form of a license.txt file. Once you obtain the license.txt key file, copy it to your FreeSurfer installation directory. This is also the location defined by the FREESURFER_HOME environment variable.

Follow this link to obtain a license key.

Test your FreeSurfer Installation

Close any terminal windows you have open and then open a new one.

Copy and paste this command into the terminal window:

freeview -v $SUBJECTS_DIR/bert/mri/brainmask.mgz \
-v $SUBJECTS_DIR/bert/mri/aseg.mgz:colormap=lut:opacity=0.2 \
-f $SUBJECTS_DIR/bert/surf/lh.white:edgecolor=yellow \
-f $SUBJECTS_DIR/bert/surf/rh.white:edgecolor=yellow \
-f $SUBJECTS_DIR/bert/surf/lh.pial:annot=aparc:edgecolor=red \
-f $SUBJECTS_DIR/bert/surf/rh.pial:annot=aparc:edgecolor=red

The above command will open the freeview GUI and the subject named 'bert' which comes with your FreeSurfer installation and can be used as an example for what FreeSurfer output should look like.

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If you encounter problems with your installation or have any questions about FreeSurfer, you can