Apple is more than Ipods and Macs. Apple is extremely prevalent in the life sciences, and increasing in popularity and in adoptions in neuroimaging labs. Much of the imaging software in common use now was first developed in the mid-1990s, by physicists. The engineering behind that software is now dated, focusing on things like a small memory footprint—performance bottlenecks were completely different than they are with current systems. Most older programs were also written for specific labs that used only a few file formats and so tend to be very restrictive about what formats they will support.

NeuroLens, developed by Rick Hoge at the A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. Rick is a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School, Department of Radiology, whose interests focus on cerebrovascular physiology and the physics of how this affects the signal screen seen in MRI scans. The application is targeted specifically at the research community, who works with large data sets—neurologists, biologists, and neuropsychologists, all doing basic research on brain function. The work is funded by the Office of National Drug Control Policy as part of a project to understand the genetic bases of addiction and depression.

Rick designed NeuroLens much like [Adobe] Photoshop—it can read many data storage formats and get it into the program. “We focused on interoperability,” Rick explains. “In some instances, NeuroLens will be used for its front end to read three dimensional surface images of the brain with another program. In this way, it doesn’t replace other tools, but can be used in conjunction with them."

Brain imaging from MRI studies result in a series of three-dimensional images. Image analysis generally consists of image processing steps for data quality improvement, followed by statistical analysis to identify regions of brain activation during a task or stimulus that was applied when the subject was scanned. This multi-step process can be complicated by outdated software systems.

“For example,” Rick says, “a series of 3D images must be aligned to reduce the effect of subject motion and are often spatially smoothed in 3D to improve signal-to-noise ratio. Using the improved data structures, tasks that might have taken half an hour in the past can now be done in seconds. It is a research imaging tool whose performance far surpasses anything in use today, one that is easy to use, intuitive, and has the capabilities to analyze and combine data from many different sources in forms that are extremely useful for researchers. NeuroLens is an integrated visualization and analysis package for quantitative physiological neuroimaging, now in public Beta. Looks like Apple has a good slice of the growing neuroinformatics market.