This toolbox is an extension to SPM (Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology) to provide computational anatomy. This covers diverse morphometric methods such as voxel-based morphometry (VBM), surface-based morphometry (SBM), deformation-based morphometry (DBM), and region- or label-based morphometry (RBM).
It is developed by Christian Gaser and Robert Dahnke (Jena University Hospital, Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology) and free but copyright software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
CAT toolbox Older versions can be obtained here or versions <= CAT12.9 here.
If you intend to install the newest developer version from Github:
- Download ZIP CAT: https://github.com/ChristianGaser/cat12/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
- Remove any old CAT installation from spm/toolbox
- Unzip cat12-main.zip to spm/toolbox/ and rename the folder cat12-main to CAT
CAT is designed to work with SPM12 or newer and tested against MATLAB 2020a (or newer) but may work with earlier versions. The compiled functions are built with Matlab R2020a (Linux, Mac Intel), R2022a (Windows) and R2023b (Mac ARM64), which are therefore the oldest supported versions on these platforms. No additional toolboxes are required.
- Remove the old cat12 or CAT folder in spm/toolbox if existing
- Unpack the zip-file
- Copy the CAT folder to the spm/toolbox directory
- If once installed use the update function in CAT in order to check for new versions
- After restarting SPM either call CAT via the toolbox button or (as short-cut) type CAT on the Matlab command line.
- On macOS, the CAT binaries of a downloaded zip-file are quarantined and blocked by Gatekeeper. CAT removes the quarantine when it is started. If this fails, run
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/spm/toolbox/CATin a Terminal.
The advantage of the standalone version is that no Matlab license is needed. Only the (free) Matlab Runtime R2023b (v232) has to be downloaded. However, there are some limitations (e.g. no parallelization and no interactive help in the GUI version) and the standalone version is mainly intended to run without GUI on Unix systems. Please check the ENIGMA CAT site for more information and examples to call CAT from shell scripts.
On macOS, cat_standalone.sh removes the quarantine of the downloaded standalone folder. If you start the standalone otherwise, run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/cat_standalone in a Terminal first.
The MATLAB Compiler Runtime (MCR) enables you to run applications compiled within MATLAB using MATLAB Compiler. MCR does not require a MATLAB license and can be used to run the MATLAB compiled program on computers which do not have MATLAB installed.
| CAT Standalone | MCR |
|---|---|
| Linux | Linux |
| Mac Intel | Mac Intel |
| Mac ARM64 (Silicon) | Mac ARM64 (Silicon) |
| Windows | Windows |
Older standalone versions (CAT12.9 or newer) can be found here.