Analyze4D

Analyze4D is a comprehensive tool for advanced region of interest/time course analysis of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. This Matlab based tool is open source and is completely GUI based, so no experience of any programming language, whatsoever, is needed to use it.

 

Analyze4D has a plethora of tools to help you select regions of interest and analyze the time series of voxels inside these regions of interest. Coupled with its ability to read virtually any neuroimaging data format, Analyze4D enables anyone involved with fMRI to use this tool for analyzing their data at any stage in their analysis.

Analyzing voxel time courses can be a very effective tool in gaining better understanding of how the brain is responding to a particular experimental manipulation. By analyzing voxel time course behavior, you can verify if the stimulus is eliciting the right activity patterns in the brain. This can be done very early on in the experimental design process. Most of the times, researchers do many pilot experiments before going on to a full blown experiment. And sometimes, carrying out a full blown statistical parametric analysis might be too much of a hassle for each of these pilots. Sometimes you would just wish that you had a tool through which you could view any voxel in action and just visually verify if the experimental manipulation had the desired effect. Well, that’s where Analyze4D comes into the picture. Using Analyze4D early on in your experiment, you can better tweak your design and be sure that there are no surprises waiting for you when you do a full blown statistical analysis, once you have collected data from all your subjects.Although most existing neuroimaging analysis softwares can do very sophisticated statistical measures on your fMRI data, but when it comes to just visualizing the raw voxel time course, these softwares leave much to be to desired. Analyze4D can read almost any data format and is therefore, meant to complement any of the existing neuroimaging softwares that you might be using for fMRI data analysis. So whether you are using SPM, FSL, BrainVoyager or AFNI, you can start using Analyze4D to give your analysis a fourth dimension, the dimension of time.

Any operating system (Windows, Linux, MAC but we tested it only on Windows so far.)

• Matlab R2010a or higher with image processing toolbox. Can run on lower versions as well but we have not tested it
• SPM8 (only required when using AAL masking)
• 1GB RAM minimum (4GB recommended)
• 2.4GHz processor minimum (Multi-core recommended when working in mosaic movie mode)
• 200MB diskspace
• A tonne of patience