This .zip file contains cortical surface annotations for structures sampled in the BrainSpan developmental transcriptome project  (http://brainspan.org/) for the Stage_3B_17_pcw specimen.  The annotated surfaces are stored as VTK files named as follows:

- Complete surface with vertex labels: {age}_{hemisphere}.vtk
- Surface patch for single structure: {age}_{structure_acronym}_{hemisphere}.vtk

See the BrainSpan white paper for structure acronym definitions.  The VTK file format represents each surface as a set of triangles with 3D vertex coordinates.  The top of the file first lists all of the (x,y,z) vertex coordinates in the file.  The section section of the file consists of a set of vertex indices for triangle in the surface.  The file containing the complete cortical surface will have a third section listing label IDs for each vertex listed in the first section. To see a label ID's corresponding structure, open the 'Structure.csv' file also contained in this .zip file.  Each row of the CSV describes a structure and lists its label ID.  For more details, see the VTK file format documentation (www.vtk.org/VTK/img/file-formats.pdf).

ParaView (http://www.paraview.org) is a free desktop data visualization application that will display VTK files.  To read the .vtk files programmatically, write a script using the Visualization Toolkit (a C++ data visualization library, http://vtk.org/).  Alternatively, because .vtk is a straightforward ASCII file format, writing a custom file parser is not difficult.
