I have T1-weighted MPRAGE images and I run recon-all to generate surfaces and labels in freesurfer. Then I would like to do statistical analysis in the regions I am interested in. For example, I would like to generate a histogram of intensities in frontal cortex or in occipital. I can display these regions in different color in freeview based on the look-up table but I don't know how to use them to generate histograms in freesurfer or create binary masks then I can do the analysis with these masks in matlab. 

I use freesurfer to do this because I see these beautiful color segmentations. It would be really painful to manually create regional masks for a group study. I am new to freesurfer and I really appreciate if someone can point out a direction. 

Thanks!

Best,

Yue