Besides sub-dividing the insula yourself, you might use one of the other existing sub-regions. The insula actually is sub-divided in several of the atlases distributed with AFNI. The Eickhoff-Zilles MPM atlases have the Insula Ig1,Ig2 and Id1 divisions. These are described in detail here:

http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2009/10/12/cercor.bhp208.full

The Destrieux parcellations from the Desai atlas are available in the DD_Desai_MPM (TT_desai_DD_MPM+tlrc) atlas. The insula is divided into a number of structures including ctx_lh_G_Ins_lg_and_S_cent_ins, ctx_lh_G_insular_short, ctx_lh_S_circular_insula_ant, ctx_lh_S_circular_insula_inf, ctx_lh_S_circular_insula_sup. These are for the left side; for the right-hand side of the brain, change the "lh" to "rh".

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.neuroimage.2010.06.010

You can see what's available by parsing the output of whereami with

whereami -show_atlas_code >> allatlascodes.txt
grep -i ins allatlascodes.txt

Look at the atlases as overlay datasets with
afni ~/abin

The region names will appear in the lower right of the Overlay panel. If you turn on labels for image viewer (right-click on the image viewer's grayscale bar and set Label to be on), you can see the label of the region at the crosshair on the image viewer.

Once you find the region you would like to use, you might use whereami, 3dcalc or any other AFNI program to extract that region from the atlas with something like this:

whereami -prefix rh_insula_short_mask -mask_atlas_region "DD_Desai_MPM::ctx_rh_G_insular_short"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/2014 04:47PM by Daniel Glen.