VertexWiseR: A package for simplified vertex-wise analyses of whole-brain and hippocampal surfaces in R

Currently, whole-brain vertex-wise analyses on brain surfaces commonly require specially configured operating systems/environments to run and are largely inaccessible to R users. As such, these analyses are inconvenient to execute and inaccessible to many aspiring researchers. To address these limitations, we present VertexWiseR, a user-friendly R package, to run cortical and hippocampal surface vertex-wise analyses, in just about any computer, requiring minimal technical expertise and computational resources. The package allows cohort-wise anatomical surface data to be highly compressed into a single, compact, easy-to-share file. Users can then run a range of vertex-wise statistical analyses with that single file without requiring a special operating system/environment and direct access to the preprocessed file directories. This enables the user to easily take the analyses "offline", which would be highly appropriate and conducive in classroom settings. This R package includes a conventional suite of tools for extracting, manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing vertex-wise data, and is designed to be easy for beginners to use. Furthermore, it also contains novel or advanced functionalities such as hippocampal surface analyses, meta-analytic decoding, threshold-free cluster enhancement, and mixed-effects models that would appeal to experienced researchers as well. In the current report, we showcase these functionalities in the analyses of two publicly accessible datasets. Overall, our R package opens up new frontiers for the R's user base/community and makes such neuroimaging analyses accessible to the masses.