BrainMiner: A 3-D 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 (SPMs) of the brain on a voxel-basis. However, a major limitation of the voxel-based technique is the inaccuracy of the transformation into a stereotaxic space (e. g., Talairach-Tournoux) given the wide variability in human brain structure. In order to account for this, researchers have turned to computing the statistics not on individual voxels but on predefined anatomical regions-of-interest (ROIs). A correlation coefficient is used to quantify similarity in response for various regions during an experimental setting. Since the functional inter-relationships can become rather complex, they are best understood in the context of the underlying 3-D brain anatomy. In this paper, we present a novel 3-D interface that allows the interactive exploration of the correlation datasets within a common stereotaxic atlas.