read.dti.tck: Read DTI tracking data from file in MRtrix 'TCK' format.

In freesurferformats: Read and Write 'FreeSurfer' Neuroimaging File Formats

Read DTI tracking data from file in MRtrix 'TCK' format.

Description

Reads streamlines from a TCK file, optionally gzip-compressed.

Usage

read.dti.tck(
  filepath,
  max_tracks = Inf,
  skip_tracks = 0L,
  bbox = NULL,
  chunk_values = 4e+06
)

Arguments

filepath	character string, path to the TCK or TSF file to read. Gzip-compressed files (i.e., .tck.gz) are supported and the compression is detected from the file content, not the file name.
max_tracks	numeric, the maximum number of tracks to read. Use Inf (the default) to read all tracks. This allows reading a subset of a very large tractogram without holding all of it in memory.
skip_tracks	integer, the number of tracks to skip before reading any. Skipped tracks are never held in memory.
bbox	numeric vector of length 6 or NULL. If given, only tracks that have at least one point inside the box are read, the box is given as c(xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax, zmin, zmax) in the coordinate system of the stored data. This has no effect for TSF files, which store no coordinates. The number of matching tracks cannot be known in advance, so for very large files this should be combined with a max_tracks value that is known to be safe.
chunk_values	integer, the number of payload values that are read per chunk. This is an advanced tuning parameter that does not change the result, only the peak memory usage (at most one chunk is buffered at a time) and the granularity of the file reads. The default of 4e6 values corresponds to about 32 MB of doubles. Lower it on a machine with very little free memory.

Value

named list with entries 'header' and 'tracks'. The tracks are stored in an is.fs.tracts instance: all coordinates are kept in a single matrix and tracks[[i]] returns the n x 3 coordinate matrix of the i-th track. Use fs.tracts.lengths(tck$tracks) to get the number of points of each track, and as.list(tck$tracks) to convert to a plain list of matrices.

Examples

## Not run: 
tckf <- "~/simple.tck"
tck <- read.dti.tck(tckf)

# Read only the first 1000 streamlines of a huge tractogram:
first_tracks <- read.dti.tck(tckf, max_tracks = 1000)

# Read the streamlines passing through a region:
region <- read.dti.tck(tckf, bbox = c(-10, 10, -20, 20, 0, 30))

## End(Not run)

freesurferformats documentation built on Sept. 25, 2026, 1:07 a.m.