Advanced Normalization Tools

Get the latest ANTs code

Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTS) was developed by Brian Avants, Nicolas Tustison, and Gang Song in 2014. ANTs is a C++ command-line toolkit providing functionality for image registration and segmentation.

Linux

Download the latest code into an arbitrary directory, I use ~/code:

cd ~/code
mkdir ants_{build,source}
git clone https://github.com/ANTsX/ANTs.git ./ants_source

You will also need to install the ZLIB libraries:

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

Run CMake/Make

Note

If you don't have make/cmake, follow the steps in this guide.

It's best to store manually installed software in /opt, which is the default location with ANTs /opt/ANTs. You can change the path within ccmake.

cd ~/code/ants_build
ccmake ~/code/ants_source

Hit 'c' to do an initial configuration. CMake will do some checking and then present options for review. Hit 'c' again to do another round of configuration. If there are no errors, you're ready to generate the make files by pressing 'g'.

Now you are back at the command line, it's time to compile. To save time, you can use multiple threads by using -j, for example:

sudo make -j4

This will take awhile, so grab a coffee. Once complete you need to cd into the ANTS-build directory and run make install:

cd ANTS-build
sudo make install

Post-install Configuration

If you want to use ANTs scripts, copy them from the source directory /ants_source/Scripts/ to the /opt/ANTs/bin directory where antsRegistration etc are located:

sudo cp -r ~/code/ants_source/Scripts/* /opt/ANTs/bin/

After the build, there will be a binary directory /opt/ANTs/bin that contains the programs (and scripts if you've included them). The scripts additionally require ANTSPATH to point to the bin directory including a trailing slash.

You will need to edit your .profile file by adding the following lines:

export ANTSPATH=/opt/ANTs/bin
export PATH=${ANTSPATH}:$PATH

Close your WSL and reopen. Now check the install by running:

which antsRegistration