Press Button Solutions

Abstract

Analyses of fMRI data is a science on its own. There is a variety of software packages available — shareware for the most part — that offers multifarious possibilities to analyze the data. AFNI, BrainVoyager, FSL or spm2” are the most commonly used packages to name a few. As they also offer options to analyze very complex study designs, they tend to be time consuming even in analyses of block-designs, which are the most commonly used paradigms in clinical routine. Integration of fMRI into clinical routine, therefore, requires either a team that focuses on the performance of the scan and analyses of the data, or fast and reliable solutions that enable doing that along with the pace of a busy schedule. Most institutions do not have dedicated work groups (besides those for research purposes); so, there is a need for “press-button” solutions. The idea is not new (Moller et al. 2005), and all manufacturers offer software packages to analyze fMRI data. Recently, it has been shown that most of the commonly used packages are similar in terms of finding areas that have been programmed into the data (Morgan et al. 2001; Cheng et al. 2006); so, the choice of software seems to be determined by the user's preference. However, a comparison of the various software packages provided by the manufacturers has not been performed to date.