Use FreeSurfer, be happy!!
You may be curious and ask what is FreeSurfer. Well, it has nothing to do with surfing but many people in my research community believe that using the results that it creates is as fun as surfing itself! I am a researcher in medical imaging and a Research Community Coordinator in the exciting field of medical image analysis and I commonly use FreeSurfer, which is a popular neuroimage analysis package. I hope some of you appreciate the excitement that creating a 3D surface model of a human brain can bring; looking into brains internal structures, and decoding its emotions and activity by writing some simple commands is a lot of fun, quite adventurous and much easier than surfing! If you are curious to try for yourself, then you should attend some of the courses that we run on medical image analysis tools.
Last month with the support from the University of Melbourne, my very supportive supervisor A/Prof. Leigh Johnston and my amazing team at Research Platforms Services, I had the chance to travel to the US, visit some laboratories and attend the FreeSurfer course in Boston. The course was held by the developers of the Freesurfer package at Laboratory of Computational Neuroimaging who are affiliated with MIT/and Harvard universities. It was an intensively interactive course that covered both the theoretical and practical aspects of functional and structural brain image analysis using Freesurfer. One of my favorite parts of the course was “A Non-physicist’s Intro to MRI”. Dr. Dylan Tisdall remarking that “we are all a dirty bag of water with some protein in it”. So he taught us the introduction to MR physics using a fish bowl!!
In addition to the course, I enjoyed networking with the FreeSurfer course developers, who are some of the top researchers in their field, and also sharing ideas with medical imaging researchers from all around the world. Among attendees, I think I was the winner of travelling the furthest distance, with the biggest time difference and having the worst jet lag! At the end of the course everyone was completely fascinated by the capabilities of the software package and they could not wait to get back to their hometown and start carrying out the analysis on their own data.
#FreeSurfer course is coming to a close. Attendees can’t wait to use all those amazing tools on their own data!! pic.twitter.com/OyyvRvWc51
Inspired by the course in Boston, I am preparing to teach our own FreeSurfer workshop at the University of Melbourne; to those who have not started using it yet and to those who are not aware of its full capabilities. Especially since the FreeSurfer package is installed on the University’s High Performance Computing (HPC) system, it is accessible to all departments, and makes running analysis on large imaging datasets really fast and easy. What do you think? Please feel free to get in contact with me if you would like more information, or if you’re keen in being part of a larger FreeSurfer community here at the University of Melbourne! r.shishegar@student.unimelb.edu.au
