Greg's Adventures in Brain-Mapping
After four years working in a lab devoted to the functional
mapping of the human brain, I did learn a few things about how all
that stuff works. I even wrote or co-wrote some useful software for
analyzing the data. In chronological order:
- EMMA, a
MATLAB library for working with medical image in
MINC
files; somewhat biased towards analysing dynamic PET studies.
Conceived by Sean Marrett and co-written by Mark Wolforth and
me. Maintained for several years by me; now unmaintained
(AFAIK).
- MNI
AutoReg (automated registration package); really Louis
Collins' baby, I just rewrote a big ugly Perl script into a
big not-so-ugly Perl script, and did a lot of debugging,
porting, and release mechanics.
- the MNI Perl Library: a handful of Perl modules for writing
"glorified shell scripts", i.e. Perl programs that mostly
run other programs, presumably long-running
low-level number-crunchers which must be run in a carefully
controlled and logged way, and whose failures must be avoided
if possible, and dealt with robustly when they do happen