I'm new to FreeSurfer (so sorry in advance for any failures to make sense!), and have read through Bruce Fischl's '99 papers on how FreeSurfer maps the yellow (white?) surface onto a template sphere (equipped with convexity information), and have tried to go through the introductory material on the wiki, but I can't seem to figure out an answer to my question.
Ideally, given subjects A and B, I'd like to be able to find a one-to-one map between the white surface of A given in A's native volume space, and the white surface of B, given in B's native volume space.
My (vague) understanding from the '99 HBM paper is that the transformation of the white surface proceeds in two steps: first the mesh in native space is "spherized" in a way that minimizes metric distortion, and then the resulting mesh is warped to optimize a match between the convexity at each mesh vertex and the convexity at the point of the spherical convexity template that the vertex is mapped to (by "spherizing" followed by warping).
From this, I assume that a vertex in native space may be mapped to a non-vertex in the spherical convexity template, which could make impossible to have a sensible one-to-one map from the white surface mesh of subject A to the white surface mesh of subject B (via maps back and forth to the template). But does the corresponding map between the full white surface of subject A to the full white surface of subject B exists? And if so, are there FreeSurfer commands could I use to extract this map explicitly, or might it only exists in form of calculations that aren't stored?
I hope this makes some sense, or at least that if it doesn't, someone might be able to point me to the right resources that could clear up my confusion.
Thanks in advance for your help and your patience!
Best regards,
David Romano
P.S. I have the same question about the pial surface, but this seems like it would be an order of magnitude more complicated.