I have just fixed a bug in FreeSurfer that involves computing the area of some surface structures. For those of you who care, this was a bug that emerged after converting our surface meshes from quadralaterals to triangles. This change was made a few years ago.
This change should have little effect on the reconstruction. It will have an effect on programs that report the area of subsections of cortex (but not total cortical area). At least three such programs that are affected are: mris_compute_overlap, mris_label_area, and mri_surfcluster. The bug causes the reported area to appear to be 1.5 times what it really is. For example, in mri_surfcluster, a cluster threshold of 300 mm^2 would actually be a threshold of 200 mm^2.
For those in the NMR center, these three programs have been updated. For those outside, you can get these programs from
ftp://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/transfer/outgoing/flat/greve
New versions of freesurfer will, of course, have the update.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
doug