You've just finished doing some research using fMRI to measure brain activity. You designed the study, recruited the volunteers, and did all the scans. Phew. Is that it? Can you publish the findings yet?
Unfortunately, no. You still need to do the analysis, and this is often the trickiest stage. The raw data produced during an fMRI experiment are meaningless - in most cases, each scan will give you a few hundred almost-identical grey pictures of the person's brain. Making sense of them requires some complex statistics.
The very first step is choosing which software to use. Just as some people swear by Firefox while others prefer Internet Explorer for browsing the web, neuroscientists have various options to choose from in terms of image analysis software. Everyone's got a favourite. In Britain, the most popular are FSL (developed at Oxford) and SPM (London), while in the USA BrainVoyager sees a lot of use.
