The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by dogado GmbH, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider. Check out our Wordpress Tutorial.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]dogado.de.

freesurferformats: Read and Write 'FreeSurfer' Neuroimaging File Formats

Provides functions to read and write neuroimaging data in various file formats, with a focus on 'FreeSurfer' formats. This includes, but is not limited to, the following file formats: 1) MGH/MGZ/NIFTI format files, which can contain multi-dimensional images or other data. Typically they contain time-series of three-dimensional brain scans acquired by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They can also contain vertex-wise measures of surface morphometry data. The MGH format is named after the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the MGZ format is a compressed version of the same format. 2) 'FreeSurfer' morphometry data files in binary 'curv' format. These contain vertex-wise surface measures, i.e., one scalar value for each vertex of a brain surface mesh. These are typically values like the cortical thickness or brain surface area at each vertex. 3) Annotation file format. This contains a brain surface parcellation derived from a cortical atlas. 4) Surface file format. Contains a brain surface mesh, given by a list of vertices and a list of faces.

Version: 1.0.2
Imports: utils, pkgfilecache (≥ 0.1.1), xml2
Suggests: knitr, rmarkdown, curl, testthat (≥ 2.1.0), oro.nifti (≥ 0.9), gifti (≥ 0.7.5), cifti (≥ 0.4.5)
Published: 2026-09-08
DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.freesurferformats
Author: Tim Schäfer ORCID iD [aut, cre], Van Essen Lab [cph] (Copyright holder of the Conte69 template and HCP group-average data files that can OPTIONALLY be downloaded via download_opt_data().), Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) [cph] (Copyright holder of the MNI152/avg152T1 template that can OPTIONALLY be downloaded via download_opt_data().)
Maintainer: Tim Schäfer <ts+code at rcmd.org>
BugReports: https://github.com/dfsp-spirit/freesurferformats/issues
License: MIT + file LICENSE
Copyright: Tim Schäfer (package code); the optional data files that can be downloaded at runtime are owned by their respective copyright holders, see 'inst/COPYRIGHTS'.
freesurferformats copyright details
URL: https://github.com/dfsp-spirit/freesurferformats, https://dfsp-spirit.github.io/freesurferformats/
NeedsCompilation: no
In views: MedicalImaging
CRAN checks: freesurferformats results

Documentation:

Reference manual: freesurferformats.html , freesurferformats.pdf
Vignettes: Reading FreeSurfer neuroimaging data with freesurferformats (source, R code)
Computing volume header data with freesurferformats (source, R code)
Writing FreeSurfer neuroimaging data with freesurferformats (source, R code)

Downloads:

Package source: freesurferformats_1.0.2.tar.gz
Windows binaries: r-devel: freesurferformats_1.0.2.zip, r-release: freesurferformats_1.0.2.zip, r-oldrel: freesurferformats_1.0.2.zip
macOS binaries: r-release (arm64): freesurferformats_1.0.1.tgz, r-oldrel (arm64): freesurferformats_1.0.2.tgz, r-release (x86_64): freesurferformats_1.0.2.tgz, r-oldrel (x86_64): freesurferformats_1.0.2.tgz
Old sources: freesurferformats archive

Reverse dependencies:

Reverse imports: fsbrain, ieegio, threeBrain, VertexWiseR, wal
Reverse suggests: ggseg.meshes, neuromapr, ravetools, scimesh

Linking:

Please use the canonical form https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=freesurferformats to link to this page.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.