Current fMRI neuroimaging software programs offer the researcher a wealth of analysis methods and tools. However, the incompatibilities in user interface, data format, and computing environment in these tools make it difficult if not impossible for most researchers to take advantage of the full set of tools available for neuroimaging analyses. This software development project will address this problem by creating a common graphical, user friendly environment in which it is easy to incorporate, use and combine analysis tools developed by independent research laboratories. The environment will be a modular, Java-based, CORBA compliant, user extensible client/server architecture with support for parallel processes. Rather than focussing on the development of new analysis tools, we will focus on the development of """"""""software wrappers"""""""" which will allow us to substantially improve the interfaces to existing tools without requiring that they themselves be changed. The first specific aim is to write a set of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to existing fMRI analysis programs that will provide easy to use front-ends for the researcher. We will demonstrate the feasibility, flexibility, and usefulness of this approach by creating wrappers for a significant collection of fMRI analysis software, including locally developed packages such as BRAIN, IFIS, and NIS, which are used by a number of independent laboratories within the Pittsburgh neuroimaging community, and extending to include widely used packages such as AIR and AFNI. To facilitate the integration of these fMRI software packages in the common graphical environment, we will develop two support utilities: 1) format conversion routines for common medical imaging formats such as ANALYZE and DICOM, and 2)synthetic dataset generators to help evaluate analysis programs under a variety of test conditions. The second specific aim is to develop a user friendly graphical """"""""Desktop"""""""" that permits the researcher to dynamically link together multiple programs, combine them into one processing stream, and, launch these computations on remote servers from desktop (client) machines. This Desktop will be written in Java and will use CORBA to manage the client/server interactions.
| Fissell, Kate; Tseytlin, Eugene; Cunningham, Daniel et al. (2003) Fiswidgets: a graphical computing environment for neuroimaging analysis. Neuroinformatics 1:111-25 |
