Plotting brain atlases in ggplot2 with ggseg

Package

Author

Athanasia Mo

Desikan-Killiany cortical atlas plot

The ggseg package comes with a function of the same name which can be used to plot brain segmentations. The function displays the Desikan-Killiany cortical atlas by default, as in the following example.

# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("LCBC-UiO/ggseg")
library(ggseg)

ggseg()

Desikan-Killiany cortical atlas plot

The function has several arguments that allow selecting the hemisphere, the view or even the color and size of the segmentation lines.

# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("LCBC-UiO/ggseg")
library(ggseg)

ggseg(mapping = aes(fill = region),
      colour = "gray3",    # Color of the segmentation
      size = 1,            # Size of the segmentation
      hemisphere = "left", # or "right"
      view = "lateral") +  # or "medial"
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Brain atlas plot customization

The package also provides a geom named geom_brain. In the following example each region is colorized and a legend with four columns is displayed.

# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("LCBC-UiO/ggseg")
library(ggseg)
# install.packages("ggplot2")
library(ggplot2)

ggplot() +
  geom_brain(atlas = dk) +
  guides(fill = guide_legend(ncol = 4)) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(legend.position = "bottom",
        legend.text = element_text(size = 8))

geom_brain function in ggplot2

Freesurfer automatic subcortical segmentation plot

Freesurfer automatic subcortical segmentation of a brain volume plot

The other atlas that comes with the package is aseg, which provides the Freesurfer automatic subcortical segmentation of a brain volume.

# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("LCBC-UiO/ggseg")
library(ggseg)

ggseg(atlas = aseg)

Aseg atlas customization

You can also display only one hemisphere of the brains making use of the hemisphere argument.

# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("LCBC-UiO/ggseg")
library(ggseg)

ggseg(atlas = aseg,
      hemisphere = "left") # or "right"

The geom_brain function also supports the aseg atlas.

aseg atlas brain in ggplot

# install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("LCBC-UiO/ggseg")
library(ggseg)
# install.packages("ggplot2")
library(ggplot2)

ggplot() +
  geom_brain(atlas = aseg) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(legend.position = "bottom",
        legend.text = element_text(size = 8)) +
  guides(fill = guide_legend(ncol = 4))

If you like this package consider taking a look to ggseg3d for 3D brain atlas plotting and ggsegExtra for additiona atlases as well as functions and pipelines to create custom atlases.