BrainMiner: A 3D Visual Interface for the Investigation of Functional Relationships in the Brain


Brain imaging methods used in experimental brain research such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Functional Magnetic Resonance (fMRI) require the analysis of large amounts of data. Statistical methods are necessary to obtain a reliable measure of a given effect. Typically, researchers report their findings by listing those regions which show significant statistical activity in a group of subjects under some experimental condition or task. A number of methods create statistical parametric maps of the brain on a voxel-basis. Other researchers have turned to computing the statistics not on individual voxels but on anatomical regions. Our approach follows this mindset: the correlations are calculated on the basis of predefined anatomical regions-of-interest (ROIs). The correlation coefficient is then used to quantify similarity in response for various regions during an experimental setting. The functional inter-relationships can become rather complex and are best understood in the context of the underlying 3D brain anatomy. In this talk, we present a novel 3D interface that allows the interactive exploration of the correlational datasets within a common stereotaxic atlas.

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