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Samseg (cross-sectional, longitudinal, MS lesions)

This functionality is available in FreeSurfer 7, with gradual improvements appearing in the development version.

Author: Koen Van Leemput

E-mail: koen [at] nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

Rather than directly contacting the author, please post your questions on this module to the FreeSurfer mailing list at freesurfer [at] nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

If you use these tools in your analysis, please cite:

See also: ThalamicNuclei, HippocampalSubfieldsAndNucleiOfAmygdala, BrainstemSubstructures


1. General Description

Sequence Adaptive Multimodal SEGmentation (SAMSEG) is a tool to robustly segment dozens of brain structures from head MRI scans without preprocessing. The characteristic property of SAMSEG is that it accepts multi-contrast MRI data without prior assumptions on the specific type of scanner or pulse sequences used. Dedicated versions to handle longitudinal data, or to segment white matter lesions in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients are also available.

The figure below illustrates a typical SAMSEG segmentation result on a T1w-FLAIR scan of a MS patient:
3D_small.png

2. Basic SAMSEG (cross-sectional processing)

In its most basic form SAMSEG takes one or more co-registered MRI volumes as input, and produces an output segmentation in around 10 min on a good desktop computer (with multi-threading enabled). Preprocessing of the scan(s) with FreeSurfer is neither required nor recommended (e.g., no reformatting to 1mm isotropic resolution, no bias field correction and no skull stripping is needed nor recommended). The command line is:

run_samseg --input <file> [<file> ...] --output <dir> [--threads <threads>] [--pallidum-separate] 

where:

The output will consist of the following set of files, which can be found under the specified <dir> directory:

Running

run_samseg --help

will display instructions for using more advanced options, including the ability to save the full probabilistic ("soft") segmentations and skipping the initial subject-to-atlas affine registration step.

Examples:

Segment a single T1w scan using a single CPU core (e.g., for running on a cluster):

run_samseg --input /home/username/data/t1.nii --output /home/username/data/samsegOutput/ 

Segment a single T1w scan with 8 CPU cores:

run_samseg --input /home/username/data/t1.nii --output /home/username/data/samsegOutput/ --threads 8

Segment a subject with both T1w and a FLAIR scan (provided both scans are co-registered and have the same image grid size and voxel resolution -- see below) using 4 threads:

run_samseg --input /home/username/data/t1.nii /home/username/data/flair.nii --pallidum-separate --output /home/username/data/samsegOutput/ --threads 4


Co-registering multi-contrast data:

When giving multi-contrast data as input, SAMSEG requires that both have already been co-registered and reformatted to the same image grid. It is recommended to reformat each contrast to the contrast with the highest spatial resolution (smallest voxel size) in order to prevent loss of information.

In FreeSurfer

mri_coreg --mov flair.nii --ref t1.nii --reg flairToT1.lta
mri_vol2vol --mov  flair.nii  --reg flairToT1.lta  --o flair_reg.nii --targ t1.nii


3. Usage