read.fs.series.cifti: Read surface time series data from CIFTI dtseries files.

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

Read surface time series data from CIFTI dtseries files.

Description

Uses the 'cifti' package to load the data from a CIFTI dtseries file (a dense surface time series) and returns the per-vertex time series for a single brain structure as a matrix.

Usage

read.fs.series.cifti(filepath, brain_structure = "CIFTI_STRUCTURE_CORTEX_LEFT")

Arguments

filepath

character string, the full path to a file in CIFTI 2 format, should end with '.dtseries.nii'. Note that this is NOT a NIfTI file, despite the '.nii' part; it uses a CIFTI 2 header instead. See the spec for details.

brain_structure

character string or integer, the brain structure for which the data should be extracted from the file. Can be a CIFTI brain structure string (one of 'CIFTI_STRUCTURE_CORTEX_LEFT' or 'CIFTI_STRUCTURE_CORTEX_RIGHT'), or simply one of 'lh', 'rh' (which are used as aliases for the former). If you specify 'both', a named list with entries 'lh' and 'rh' will be returned. If it is an integer, it will be interpreted as an index into the list of structures within the CIFTI file, use with care.

Value

A numeric matrix with one row per vertex in the surface and one column per time point (series point) in the file. The value for vertices which did not have a value in the CIFTI data is set to NA. If 'brain_structure' is 'both', a named list with entries 'lh' and 'rh', each a matrix as described above.

Note

This function calls code from the 'cifti' package by John Muschelli: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=cifti.

References

See https://www.nitrc.org/forum/attachment.php?attachid=341&group_id=454&forum_id=1955 for the CIFTI 2 file format spec. See https://www.nitrc.org/projects/cifti/ for more details on CIFTI, including example files.

Examples

## Not run: 
# Downloaded CIFTI2 example data from https://www.nitrc.org/projects/cifti/
cifti_example_data_dir <- "~/data/cifti"
dtseries_file <- file.path(cifti_example_data_dir,
  "Conte69.MyelinAndCorrThickness.32k_fs_LR.dtseries.nii");
series_lh <- read.fs.series.cifti(dtseries_file, "lh");
series_both <- read.fs.series.cifti(dtseries_file, "both");

## End(Not run)

freesurferformats documentation built on Sept. 8, 2026, 5:08 p.m.