Research using functional neuroimaging has suffered from a proliferation of incompatible, difficult-to-use, inefficient, and often expensive software tools. The central motivation of the VoxBo project is to provide highly interoperable, flexible, easy-to-use, free software for the analysis of brain images (the focus is on functional brain imaging with fMRI). More generally, our goal is to provide a broad solution to interoperability issues, so that anyone using VoxBo may also use a broad variety of other software packages, transparently intermixing components according to their needs. Major development goals also include a detailed user-extensible knowledge base (help system), to provide both general and context-appropriate guidance in the analysis process, and user interface refinements to reduce the proportion of the user's time devoted to repetitive, mechanical tasks.
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Although the focus of the project is on functional brain imaging with fMRI, we anticipate that many of the components of the package will be useful to researchers in other areas related to brain imaging (structural brain imaging, functional imaging with PET, etc.). The framework may be useful beyond the boundaries of brain imaging.
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