CAT – A Computational Anatomy Toolbox for the Analysis of Structural MRI Data

A large range of sophisticated brain image analysis tools have been developed by the neuroscience community, greatly advancing the field of human brain mapping. Here we introduce theComputational Anatomy Toolbox(CAT) – a powerful suite of tools for brain morphometric analyses with an intuitive graphical user interface, but also usable as a shell script. CAT is suitable for beginners, casual users, experts, and developers alike providing a comprehensive set of analysis options, workflows, and integrated pipelines. The available analysis streams – illustrated on an example dataset – allow for voxel-based, surface-based, as well as region-based morphometric analyses. Notably, CAT incorporates multiple quality control options and covers the entire analysis workflow, including the preprocessing of cross-sectional and longitudinal data, statistical analysis, and the visualization of results. The overarching aim of this article is to provide a complete description and evaluation of CAT, while offering a citable standard for the neuroscience community.