In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to perform a minimal FreeSurfer based T1 intensity normalization pipeline. It’s very simple, but can be daunting if you’ve never used FreeSurfer before.
Tools and files used in this article:
T1.nii.gz is an HCP T1 weighted image and the version of FreeSurfer used is freesurfer-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-stable6-20170118.
If you already have FreeSurfer installed, then do the following (otherwise you scan skip ahead to docker/singularity):
wget https://justinblaber.org/downloads/articles/t1_normalization/T1.nii.gz mri_convert T1.nii.gz T1.mgz mri_nu_correct.mni --i T1.mgz --o T1_N3.mgz --n 2 mri_normalize -g 1 -mprage T1_N3.mgz T1_norm.mgz mri_convert T1_norm.mgz T1_norm.nii.gz
The above code converts the T1 from nifti to mgz format, performs N3 normalization, performs intensity normalization, then converts back from mgz format to nifti.
If you have a FreeSurfer license and want to use a docker/singularity container instead, simply do the following instead:
mkdir INPUTS mkdir OUTPUTS wget https://justinblaber.org/downloads/articles/t1_normalization/T1.nii.gz -O INPUTS/T1.nii.gz
Then, for docker:
sudo docker run --rm \ -v $(pwd)/INPUTS/:/INPUTS/ \ -v $(pwd)/OUTPUTS:/OUTPUTS/ \ -v <path to license.txt>:/extra/freesurfer/license.txt \ --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \ justinblaber/t1_normalization:1.0.0
Or, for singularity:
singularity run -e \ -B INPUTS/:/INPUTS \ -B OUTPUTS/:/OUTPUTS \ -B <path to license.txt>:/extra/freesurfer/license.txt \ shub://justinblaber/t1_normalization_app:1.0.0
If everything runs successfully, the output should look like:
There’s an added benefit to the normalization step in that it attempts to set intensities to a predefined range:
- white matter ~ 110
- grey matter ~80
- csf ~ 35
This makes it very convenient to scale the intensities when using T1s in neural networks. If you normalize a T1 with the above pipeline, then scale the intensities from [0, 110] to [-1, 1], the normalization should be consistent across all T1s.
This is a very clear and helpful article. Nice work, and thanks!