The study of shape is ubiquitous in biology. In the context of brain imaging, shape analysis offers an intuitive yet powerful means of quantifying anatomy. Such analysis can reveal subtle genetic and disease effects on morphometry that are undetectable with standard volumetric measures.
The ENIGMA-Shape pipeline provides a streamlined tool to perform fine-grained analysis of deep gray matter morphometry using standard brain MRI. The package uses a set of common templates, harmonized for use across datasets and studies. For ease of use, ENIGMA-Shape is built as an add-on for the popular FreeSurfer software, requiring few additional computations once MRI data has been processed with FreeSurfer’s “recon-all” pipeline. The package contains all the steps necessary for performing a shape study once an MR image has been parcellated into anatomical regions, including surface modeling, semi-automated quality control, and vertex-wise statistical analysis.
