Editing labels/annotations in tksurfer

Index TableOfContents

Overview

This page describes the process of editing labels using tksurfer. Surface label data can be stored in individual label files, or the data of many labels can be stored in an annotation file. This page focuses on the annotation file way of doing things, though much of the following is relevant to the separate-label-files approach too.

Editing might be desired for a couple of reasons:

At any rate, you will want to know how to perform the following editing moves:

Editing labels turns out to be reasonably straightforward, but there are a number of idiosyncratic features to work around in tksurfer.

Background

As a starting point, let us review what you are looking at in the following picture:

xxxxxx surface with annot xxxxxxxxx

One can arrive at this picture by:

tksurfer -annot aparc subjectid rh inflated

In addition:

Now, as you float the mouse over the surface, you will see the Label and Annotation fields update. These are the values attached to the individual vertex that the mouse is hovering over.

Editing a region consists of changing the Label and/or Annotation values for the vertices of interest. Of course, editing vertices one at a time would be tedious, so instead tksurfer offers various tools to draw an outline "path" and then "fill" that shape with the desired Label value, or perform other editing operations on the outlined region.

As it turns out, however, none of this is true in tksurfer:

All that said, there is a way to proceed and get the desired results.

xxxxx display of "1 other"

Change the label (structure number) or an existing region

* Click on region to select * Open Labels dialog. (View > Windows > Labels) * Don't play around with all the possible options before reading: "gwissue_labeledit". Instead... * Note that the region you selected is also selected in the left hand list of existing regions. * To apply a different label to that region, select the desired label from the list on the right, (color changes immediately in the surface window), and also click "Set Name".

This is not a very useful procedure given an initial annotation from recon-all, since it's unlikely you want to give a provide region a new label from the provided list. However, it will come in handy for new regions that we create later.

Expand the boundary of an existing region

Author(s)

GrahamWideman, Ari Dubin