A scanner-shaped cake (MRI, maybe PET/CT?)

Made for the occasion of the first birthday of Imanova last night, and greedily consumed by slightly hungover scientists this morning.

fMRI Software (FSL, SPM, BrainVoyager) for beginners – how to choose?

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has now become a pretty mainstream activity for researchers interested in the workings of the human brain, and since its inception in the early-90s a whole load of software has been developed which can enable even the most clueless or Unix-averse researcher to (reasonably) easily perform complex analyses on fMRI datasets. I wrote a brief earlier post about fMRI software based on a presentation, and thought I’d expand on it a little more in a future series. There’s obviously a great deal to say about these pieces of software in terms of advanced features, UI etc. and I’ll get to all that at some point in the future. This post will focus on the very basic aspects of three popular choices for fMRI analysis: BrainVoyager, FSL and SPM*; what platforms they support, and the basic features of each.

2D maps of brain connectivity

Just a quickie – found this site, which has some awesome google-maps style interfaces for Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data, showing neural connectivity in the brain. Very nice. Also a downloadable application which looks very nice too. Worth checking out.

Which fMRI analysis software (SPM, BrainVoyager, FSL)?

This one’s a bit advanced for the kind of information I generally want to include on here, but I thought it might be useful to somebody, so I’d put it up. I was recently asked to do a talk on fMRI software, so put together a presentation comparing three popular choices for analysing brain imaging data: SPM, BrainVoyager and FSL. I’ve used all three packages in the past for my work, although I’m not so expert with the new versions of SPM as I used to be. The talk was pretty basic, and focussed more on features and the UI experience of the three applications, rather than any technical details.

Anyway, the slides are available for download here (PDF, 3.6Mb) if anyone’s interested. All content is my personal opinion, your mileage may vary, etc. etc.