I wish you, dear reader, a happy, healthy and successful new year 2007! In the new year we will release a number of exciting new tools to allow even more sophisticated and pleasant brain voyages. After having released BrainVoyager QX 1.8, the development is now focusing on completing a set of DTI tools for the 1.9 release, which will also bring more parallelized code routines to better exploit dual and quad-core processors.

The BrainVoyager QX v2.x series will bring new tools for multi-variate (“brain reading”) data analysis, mixed effects group analyses and automatic normalization into Talairach and MNI template space. Scripting will be enhanced including direct COM-based interactions with Matlab (on Windows). Plugin developers will get greatly enhanced GUI and graphical display tools. A new animation tool will make it very easy to create beautiful “activation movies”. A separate new “Presenter” program will be available to automatically summarize and display details of performed analyses. This standalone tool can also be used to prepare eye-catching cross-platform powerpoint-like presentations including 3D animations. “Neurolator 3D” is a new member of the BrainVoyager family, which will be also available with the BV QX 2.0 release. This program runs neural network models directly “in the brain” allowing to build information processing models constrained by neuroimaging data and to predict spatio-temporal brain activation patterns for simulated new experiments.

Most of the mentioned new tools are already available in alpha versions and will soon enter the beta test phase. While it is difficult to predict release dates, my intention is to finalize BV QX 1.9 in February/March and BV QX 2.0 in May/June. One of the major visions for the 2.x release series is to create an easy-to-use, comprehensive multi-modal neuroimaging tool supporting the combined analysis of MRI, fMRI, DTI, EEG-MEG, TMS as well as neural network modelling.

Before the next BV release, there will be coming soon a new release of the free “BV Brain Tutor” program. Its new features include display of Brodmann areas, a new “show me” mode, and the possibility to visualize labeled brain regions on both folded (see snapshot on top of this blog) and inflated (see snapshot above this paragraph) representations. The next release will then integrate display of functional areas and DTI fibers.

Our company, Brain Innovation (BI), has expanded substantially over the last year allowing an increasingly sophisticated level of customer support. If you have sent an email to “support at brainvoyager dot com”, you will be familiar with the high-quality of provided support. You might have already looked into the new “wiki” containing very useful information. Internally, BI has also established a new quality assurance system in order to test new program versions extensively prior to official release. We are currently implementing also a task/bug tracking tool to be able to respond to all of your submitted issues as thoroughly and promptly as possible.