MedINRIA MRI Visualization and Processing

I just ran across a site that has a few medical imaging software packages. One of them is MedINRIA.

“MedINRIA aims at providing to clinicians state-of-the-art algorithms dedicated to medical image processing and visualization. Efforts have been made to simplify the user interface, while keeping high-level algorithms. Each application is called a module, and can be loaded dynamically from a single main window. MedINRIA is available for Microsoft Windows XP/Vista, Linux Fedora Core, MacOSX, and is fully multithreaded.”

Link to a description and download.

MedINRIA screenshot

I have not tried the software yet – my MRI analysis software is FSL – but this software looks promising. Plus it runs natively on Windows, Linux (Fedora Core), and Mac OS X (FSL only runs natively in OS X and Linux – it’s a little tricky to run in Windows). Not that running in Windows is necessarily a perk – our preferred MRI processing workstation is a Mac – but many people are using Windows. If I get around to installing the software, I’ll post a review of it later. I’m always looking to user-friendly ways to analyze MRI data. Best of all, like FSL, it is free. It is based, in part, on the open-source and excellent ITK and VTK packages.

Neuroimaging and Image Analysis

A handy program I use to analyze MRI data is called FSL. “FSL is a comprehensive library of image analysis and statistical tools for FMRI, MRI and DTI brain imaging data. FSL is written mainly by members of the Analysis Group, FMRIB, Oxford, UK” (from the FSL website). It is powerful, flexible, and well-maintained. There is a very active community listserv too.

All of my research is structural MRI-based, so the main FSL tools I use are: Brain Extraction tool (BET), SUSAN (which reduces noise nonlinearly), FAST (an automated segmentation program that can separate the MR images into different tissue types), FLIRT (a linear registration program), and FUGUE (a program that can unwarp the MR images; there is often distortion in MRIs caused at scan acquisition by head movements or other problems).

I’ve been very pleased with the software so far. It’s free software and available to pretty much anyone for use. I have no affiliation with the software developers, I am just a pleased user of the software. I would post some of the images I’ve processed with FSL, however, due to IRB, HIPPA, and confidentiality limitations, I am unable to.