read.fs.volume.analyze: Read an ANALYZE 7.5 or NIFTI v1 pair file as an fs.volume.
In freesurferformats: Read and Write 'FreeSurfer' Neuroimaging File Formats

read.fs.volume.analyze

R Documentation

Read an ANALYZE 7.5 or NIFTI v1 pair file as an fs.volume.

Description

Read a volume from the two-file image formats ANALYZE 7.5 and NIFTI v1: a 348 byte header (⁠<base>.hdr⁠) and the voxel data in a separate file (⁠<base>.img⁠). Read read.analyze.header for the difference between the two variants and for the limitations of the ANALYZE header.

Usage

read.fs.volume.analyze(
  filepath,
  flatten = FALSE,
  with_header = FALSE,
  drop_empty_dims = FALSE,
  spm = FALSE
)

Arguments

`filepath`	character string, the path to one of the two files of the pair, or to its base name. See `analyze.pair.files`.
`flatten`	logical. Whether to flatten the return volume to a 1D vector. Useful if you know that this file contains 1D morphometry data.
`with_header`	logical. Whether to return the header as well. If TRUE, return an instance of class `fs.volume` for data with at least 3 dimensions, a named list with entries "data" and "header". The latter is another named list which contains the header data. These header entries exist: "dtype": int, one of: 0=MRI_UCHAR; 1=MRI_INT; 3=MRI_FLOAT; 4=MRI_SHORT. "voldim": integer vector. The volume (=data) dimensions. E.g., c(256, 256, 256, 1). These header entries may exist: "vox2ras_matrix" (exists if "ras_good_flag" is 1), "mr_params" (exists if "has_mr_params" is 1). See the `⁠mghheader.*⁠` functions, like `mghheader.vox2ras.tkreg`, to compute more information from the header fields.
`drop_empty_dims`	logical, whether to drop empty dimensions of the returned data
`spm`	logical, whether to interpret the ANALYZE header the way SPM, FreeSurfer and the other tools of the ecosystem do. This concerns the fields that ANALYZE 7.5 leaves undefined but that SPM uses: `funused1` is the scale factor of the data, and `originator` holds the voxel coordinates of the image origin. It makes this function apply the scale factor, and use the origin to derive a transformation matrix when the file has no MATLAB sidecar file (see the geometry section below). Only relevant for ANALYZE files, since the NIFTI v1 variant of the pair stores a proper transformation matrix.

Value

an fs.volume instance, i.e. a named list with the entries data (the voxel data) and header (the image header), or only the data array if with_header is FALSE. The header is the format specific header (an ANALYZE 7.5 header as returned by read.analyze.header for ANALYZE files, a NIFTI v1 header as returned by read.nifti1.header for NIFTI pair files), and not an MGH header. In addition, the following entries are present:

vox2ras_matrix: the 4x4 voxel-to-RAS transformation matrix, computed from the sform/qform header fields for NIFTI v1 pair files. For ANALYZE files this entry is only present if spm is TRUE, see the note below.
vox2ras_source: character string, a description of where the matrix comes from, one of 'sform', 'qform' (for NIFTI v1 pair files), 'mat sidecar', 'spm origin' or 'analyze convention' (for ANALYZE files, see the geometry section). Only present if vox2ras_matrix is present.
voldim: only present if flatten is TRUE, exactly as in the other volume readers.
filepath, filepath_header, filepath_image: the paths of the header and data files.

The geometry of ANALYZE 7.5 files

The ANALYZE 7.5 header stores the voxel sizes (pix_dim) but neither the direction of the voxel axes in world space nor the position of the image in it. This means that the left/right orientation of an ANALYZE image is not known from the header, and no implementation of the format can know it: the format is famous for exactly this problem, and the orient field that was added to fix it is set by some tools and ignored by others.

There are two ways to get a transformation matrix for such a file, and this function supports both:

The MATLAB sidecar file: SPM and FreeSurfer write the transformation matrix into a file named ⁠<base>.mat⁠ next to the ⁠<base>.img⁠ file, as a MATLAB v4 file with a variable named mat or M. This matrix is real information from the file set, not a convention, so it is used whenever such a file is present, and the vox2ras_source of the result is 'mat sidecar'. The M variant does not contain the flip of the first voxel axis that the format's original software applies, so that flip is added (this is also what the reference implementation of the format, nibabel, does). Note that the matrix in the file maps the 1-based voxel indices that MATLAB uses, and that the matrix returned here maps the 0-based indices that R and this package use: the difference is the sum of the rows of the rotation part, i.e. up to several millimeters, and getting it wrong is exactly the kind of silent error that is hard to notice. FreeSurfer writes only the M variable, nibabel writes both. MATLAB files of version 5 and newer (the .mat files that recent MATLAB versions write, which are compressed) cannot be read; such a file is reported and ignored, the volume data is still returned.
The SPM convention (spm = TRUE): If there is no sidecar file, the SPM and FreeSurfer tools derive the geometry from the fields that ANALYZE leaves unused: the originator field holds the voxel coordinates of the image origin, the voxel sizes give the axis lengths, and the axes are assumed to point to the left, the front and the top (diag(-x, y, z), the convention of the format's original software). The same spm = TRUE applies the scale factor that SPM stores in funused1. Both are heuristics that the file does not state, which is why they are not used by default: a matrix from a convention can be wrong by a mirror image.

Without a sidecar file and with spm = FALSE (the default), no matrix is reported at all: the voxel sizes and the orientation code are returned as they are stored, and you can build a matrix from them if the convention of your choice is known to be the right one for your data.

Examples

hdrfile <- system.file("extdata", "analyze", "tiny_u8.hdr",
  package = "freesurferformats", mustWork = TRUE
)
vol <- read.fs.volume.analyze(hdrfile, with_header = TRUE)
dim(vol$data)
vol$header$pix_dim

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