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Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. FAQ

FSLUTILS is a set of useful command-line utilities which allow the conversion, processing etc. of Analyze and Nifti format data sets. Many of them work on both 3D and 4D data. For each of these programs, type just the program name to get the usage help.

The different FSLUTILS programs are:

Orientation-related Utilities

Please see Orientation Explained for an explanation (both simple and also detailed) of how orientation works with NIfTI files and FSL. You should never use the tools below until you have read this page on orientation.

Tools

In nifti files it is possible to independently report or modify the qform or sform fields (see below for background information on NIfTI orientation). However, the FSL4.1 output routines will try to keep qform and sform matrices the same whenever one would otherwise be unset. Therefore it is not possible, for instance, to delete only the qform, as if the sform is set then doing this will result in the qform being set equal (as close as possible) to the sform. This is currently done to aid interoperability with other packages. However, if both qform and sform are given different values then these are preserved by the output routines.

This command does not change the data storage at all - only the orientation information in the header and so should be used with great caution. Only modify header information if you understand the information about the NIfTI orientation given below or are following (exactly) a set of steps prescribed by someone who does.

The option -deleteorient is useful for the first stage of correcting orientation/label information in images where the conversion to NIfTI does not provide the correction information. Note that the first, and by far the best, solution to this problem is to find a method of converting the images to NIfTI in a way that correctly stores the information (see above) but if this really is not possible then a combination of fslorient and fslswapdim can be used to fix it (see below).

The new orientation of the data is specified by selecting what the new axes should represent. This can either be done in terms of the old axes (x y z -x -y -z) or in terms of anatomical labels when this information is available (in a nifti image where either the sform or qform code is non-zero). The anatomical labels are RL LR AP PA SI IS. Note that the anatomical label version will not allow the left-right convention to be changed.

Ordinarily fslswapdim will change the orientation information in the header as well as reordering the data. This is so that the anatomical labels stay attached to the same parts of the image and not fixed to the voxel coordinates. Hence, reordering a coronal image to axial slicing should keep the labels correctly attached to the relevant parts of the image, as long as they were correct initially. If the initial labels are incorrect (see the labels in fslview) then fslorient needs to be used in conjunction with fslswapdim in order to correct this.

When fslswapdim is given arguments that will change the left-right orientation it will issue a warning that the left-right orientation is being flipped. It will also try to modify the orientation information in the header (only when either the sform or qform code is non-zero), but not in a way that swaps this left-right orientation in the header. Hence there is a net change in orientation as the data is swapped while the header is not. If the swap occurs on the x-axis then nothing is done to the header at all. Otherwise, the axis which is being swapped, together with the x-axis, have their orientation changed. In this way the handedness of the header is preserved, the labels associated with the y-axis and z-axis follow the image change, but the x-axis labels do not. It is recommended that if a left-right swap in storage is desired (and this should only be done if the reconstruction is initially incorrect, and cannot be fixed by finding any better conversion method) then the arguments -x y z should be used as this is the simplest form of swapping since it only affects the x-axis data and no labels or header information is changed.


CategoryOther CategoryFslutils


2014-07-08 15:34