MRtrix Tutorial #1: Download and Install

The MRtrix download page contains download and installation instructions for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux users. This process used to take a lot of time, with several dependencies and libraries that needed to be downloaded. Fortunately, the developers have recently created a one-line command that will do all of this for you:

sudo bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MRtrix3/macos-installer/master/install)"

This will download and install the entire MRtrix3 package to your machine, which will take no more than a few moments.

Once it has downloaded, open a Terminal and type the following to test your installation:

mrview

Which will open up the MRtrix viewer. In the next section we will download diffusion data, which you can load into the viewer by clicking File -> Open and selecting the diffusion image. It should look something like this:

../../_images/01_SampleImage.png

Try also typing one of the commands from the library, such as mrconvert, and press enter. If MRtrix has been installed correctly, you should see the help page printed by default when no arguments are passed to the command:

../../_images/01_MRconvert.png

If both of these work without any errors, you are ready to begin downloading diffusion data, which we turn to in the next chapter.

Video

You can find a video tutorial for Macintosh installation here.