SAMS: Surface Alignment, Mapping, and Statistics

SAMS (available here) is the main culmination of my PhD thesis: a Matlab package to automatically process, register, and analyze collections of anatomical surfaces at the resolution higher than was ever possible before it was published.

The package was designed to be both easy to use as well as be friendly in terms of hardware requirements/computational time; most of the analysis can be completed within a few hours of runtime for reasonably small collections from start to finish. After completion, you’ll have many things to use for your analysis, including:

• Accurately registered surfaces
• Visualization of embeddings of these surfaces
• Results of significance tests detailing the amount of variability of collections of surfaces
• Diagrams showing areas of significant local difference

This package, in tandem with Hecate, ariaDNE, and Auto3DGM, is a product of the effort of the Tooth and Claw group based at Duke University, the brainchild of Ingrid Daubechies and Doug Boyer.

SAMS was named in honor of Sam’s Quik Shop, a Durham, NC landmark/beer store that was near and dear to myself, my friends, and my colleagues until it was sold and torn down to be turned into luxury apartments.