External Email - Use Caution
Dear community: I was curious about how the software is made and I decided to write an email to Dr. Bruce Fischl who answered all of the questions I asked, but he gave me the input to ask these questions also in FreeSurfer Community. I first asked the programming language of the software(I didn’t know that it was even open source). He says its mostly C but also some Matlab and C++. I am concerned with the long preprocessing time of raw T1 data so if anyone has some insights about which is the longest part and how faster it can get with nowadays hardware of course share with us. I think perhaps if some of the code of C were translated to C++ may be it could be faster. Although I don’t know how faster in fact but it could be a start. It should be easier if there were someone with clear head picture of time processing in different parts of the program in different hardware specifics. I know there is an entry in FreeSurfer wiki but I’m talking of an exchange of experiences with different machines with the same version of the software. May be I am going too far on my expectations. It would be nice to have a thread where we all shared our knowledge about how to improve performance. May be programming language translation is a bit of a lazy start and a change in some of the algorithms is the what we should encourage.
Sincerely, Andrade.