Volumetric display of magnetic resonance images using Scopira and OpenGL

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a complex imaging modality that provides high resolution, non-invasive maps of neural activity in brain tissue. Neuroscientists use fMRI to probe brain function using complex cognitive and linguistic experiments. An important aspect of these experiments is the visualization of neural activations over a period of time as manifested by voxel intensity of two (or three) dimensional images across the temporal analysis dimension. Scopira is a modular algorithm development framework that consists of a user-friendly visual layout environment with a comprehensive set of scientific algorithms for biomedical data analysis. However, presently it lacks the facility for volumetric display, which is especially important to map neural activations from functional (low resolution) to anatomical (high resolution) images. In this paper, we present a volumetric display and analysis system for fMRI data using Scopira and the OpenGL library. Results have been presented to demonstrate the new software.