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About Us
The 'Medical Imaging Informatics Group, Trivandrum', the advances in Information Technology have revolutionized the field
of Radiology and Medical Imaging. RADINFO is a group of like minded scientists who are one or other way engaged in the field
of Computers in Radiology. The group has organised a one day course on Computers in Radiology(RADINFO2004) in May 2004. In
continuation to the above course and because of a felt need the group decided to hold a two day CME on Functional Neuroimaging
and Image Processing. The goal of functional neuroimaging is to map the activity of the living brain in space and time. The
gold standard for measuring brain cell activity is direct and invasive electrical recording of membrane potential of individual
neurons; however, such measurements are limited to certain experimental conditions. To study the above Functional MRI(fMRI)
was developed during last decade. The objective of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is to map active areas of
the brain corresponding to specific tasks or stimuli. Interest in fMRI is growing rapidly since it is a noninvasive technique,
provides excellent resolution, and can be performed on widely available instrumentation. Therefore, fMRI can be expected to
play an increasing role in the neurosciences, as well as in clinical diagnosis and therapy of brain disorders. The image processing
of fMRI data can be done using several image processing techniques. The most popular technique used widely by the neuro scientists
is Statistical Parametric Mapping(SPM) developed by the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College, London.
SPM refers to the construction and assessment of spatially extended statistical processes used to test hypotheses about functional
imaging data. These ideas have been instantiated in software that is called SPM. The SPM software package has been designed
for the analysis of brain imaging data sequences. The sequences can be a series of images from different cohorts, or time-series
from the same subject. Every clinician or a computer specialist working in the field of functional neuroimaging will be benefited
if they use this wonderful tool for processing of the functional neuroimaging data.
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