Hi Jayna,
Another possibility would be to decide on a y coordinate that
cuts off anterior from posterior. Then you could zero out
any part of the mask where the y value is too large.
E.g. to zero voxel with y greater than 12 (making this up):
3dcalc -a mask+tlrc -expr 'a*ispositive(12.1-y) -prefix ant.mask
That uses the y coordinate (assuming an RAI oriented dataset,
where positive y means posterior) to mask the original values.
See 3dcalc -help for more examples (such as #7).
- rick