Visualization and measurement of the cortical surface

Much of the human cortical surface is obscured from view by the complex pat tern of folds, making the spatial relationship between different surface lo cations hard to interpret. Methods fur viewing large portions of the brain' s surface in a single flattened representation are described. The flattened representation preserves several key spatial relationships between regions on the cortical surface. The principles used in the implementations and ev aluations of these implementations using artificial test surfaces are provi ded. Results of applying the methods to structural magnetic resonance measu rements of the human brain are also shown. The implementation details are a vailable in che source code, which is freely available on the Internet.