Upcoming FreeSurfer courses

If you would like to be notified about upcoming FreeSurfer courses, sign up for the course mailing list.. We host two Boston courses each year, typically in the first week of April and the last week of September.

Suggested Steps for Conducting an at-home FreeSurfer Course

Step 1: Download FreeSurfer For your Computer

Follow the instructions on this page to get FreeSurfer on your personal computer. We highly recommend downloading the standalone Dev version of Freeview to replace the Freeview application in the FreeSurfer v6.0 download package due to incompatabilites with newer operating systems (especially if you have a mac).

Step 2: Download the tutorial data

Download the tutorial data here (~ 8GB).

Step 3: test your FreeSurfer Install and Tutorial Data

These are some instructions written by Paul Wighton on how to run a script that will test some of the FreeSurfer tutorial commands on your laptop and ensure your install is working well enough to attempt the tutorials for the course.

FreeSurfer 6 can be downloaded from here: https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pub/dist/freesurfer/6.0.0/freesurfer-Linux-centos6_x86_64-stable-pub-v6.0.0.tar.gz
More insallation instructions can be found here: https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/DownloadAndInstall
The tutorial data can be downloaded from here: https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pub/data/tutorial_data.tar.gz

On my machine, I stored the downloaded `tar.gz` files in a directory called `/home/paul/lcn/data/fs-course-20200310`.  After extracting the archives I have the following subdirectories in `/home/paul/lcn/data/fs-course-20200310`
- `freesurfer`
- `tutorial_data_20190918_1558`

Next, edit the file `bashrc` in the `tutorial_data_20190918_1558` directory.  (In my case, the full path of that file is `/home/paul/lcn/data/fs-course-20200310/tutorial_data_20190918_1558/bashrc`) and change lines 16 and 19 to match the location of freesurfer and the tutorial data on your machine.

In my case, I edited the lines to read:
- Line 16: `export TUTORIAL_DATA=/home/paul/lcn/data/fs-course-20200310/tutorial_data_20190918_1558`
- Line 19: `export FREESURFER_HOME=/home/paul/lcn/data/fs-course-20200310/freesurfer`

Next, change into the tutorial data directory:

```
cd /home/paul/lcn/data/fs-course-20200310/tutorial_data_20190918_1558
```

and test the installation by running:
```
source bashrc
test_commands.sh.15
```

This may take a while (30 minutes to an hour) and the script will constantly "steal focus" so you will not be able to use your machine while the tests are running.

If at some point, you see:
```
mean.practice.table (END)
```

Hit `q` so the script can continue (I had to do this twice)

When you see `colortable with 14176 entries read (originally /autofs/cluster/freesurfer/centos7_x86_64/stable6/FreeSurferColorLUT.txt)` you can hit enter and the script will end.

Step 4: Suggested Schedule (5 days)

Day 1: Intro to FreeSurfer and Working with the Individual Subject

Subject

Talk

Slides

Relevant Tutorials

Intro to Linux for FreeSurfer Users

Talk

*Slides

Tutorial

Intro to FreeSurfer Jargon

Talk

Slides

N/A

Intro to FreeSurfer Software

Talk

Slides

N/A

Analyzing the Individual Subject

Part 1, Part 2

Slides

N/A

Intro to Freeview and the FreeSurfer Output

Freeview demonstration

N/A

Introduction to FreeSurfer Output Tutorial, Practice Working with Data

ROI Analysis

Talk

Slides

ROI Analysis Tutorial

Bonus Talks: Intro to MRI Presentation,Intro to MR Slides, MRI Aquisition Techniques for Morphometry, MRI Acquisition Methods Slides

Day 2: More Structural Processing and Troubleshooting

Subject

Talk

Slides

Relevant Tutorials

Troubleshooting

Talk, Demo

FreeSurfer Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting Tutorial

Longitudinal Analysis

Talk

Longitudinal FreeSurfer

LongitudinalTutorial

An Overview of Registration Methods

Talk

An Overview of Registration Methods

N/A

Day 3: Group Analysis and Statistics

Subject

Talk

Slides

Relevant Tutorials

Surface-based analysis: Intersubject Registration & Smoothing

Talk

Slides

N/A

Group Analysis

Part 1, Part 2

Group Analysis

Group Analysis Tutorial

Multiple Comparisons

Talk

Multiple Comparisons Slides

Multiple Comparisons Tutorial

Day 4: Multimodal Analysis / Diffusion Analysis

Subject

Talk

Slides

Relevant Tutorials

Intro to Diffusion

Part 1, Part 2

Introduction to Diffusion MRI

Diffusion Processing Tutorial

Multi-Modal Integration

Part 1, Part 2

Multi-Modal Integration, Part 1: Registration, Multi-Modal Integration, Part 2: Group Analysis

Multi-Modal Integration Tutorial, Part 1 ,Multi-Modal Integration Tutorial, Part 2

Tracts Constrained by Underlying Anatomy (TRACULA)

Part 1, Part 2

Slides

TRACULA Tutorial

Bonus Talks and Slides: Longitudinal TRACULA

Day 5: fMRI Analysis and FSFAST

Subject

Talk

Slides

Relevant Tutorials

Basics of fMRI

Intro to fMRI Talk

Slides

Resting State fMRI

Resting State fMRI Presentation

Resting State fMRI Slides

N/A

FSFAST

FSFAST Presentation

FSFAST, Part 1: Preprocessing, FSFAST, Part 2: GLM Analysis

FSFAST Tutorial, Part 1, FSFAST Tutorial, Part 2

Bonus Talks and Slides: Structural & Functional Data Integration

Getting the Help and Support you need

For questions related to your own data processing and for troubleshooting help, please contact the FreeSurfer mailing list: freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu and attach your recon-all.log file to your email.

For tutorial-specific questions, over the next two weeks (March 23 - April 3rd) our FreeSurfer tutorial support team will be extra available to set up video chats or answer your questions over email. Feel free to email the addresses on the list below for help:

mlarrabee1@mgh.harvard.edu, dccordero@mgh.harvard.edu, mvera2@mgh.harvard.edu, lmorgan6@mgh.harvard.edu, brd15@mgh.harvard.edu