BRANT: A Versatile and Extendable Resting-State fMRI Toolkit

Kaibin Xu; Yong Liu; Yafeng Zhan; Jiaji Ren; Tianzi Jiang

doi:10.3389/fninf.2018.00052

BRANT: A Versatile and Extendable Resting-State fMRI Toolkit

Front Neuroinform. 2018 Sep 3:12:52. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2018.00052. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Kaibin Xu^{1

2

3

4}, Yong Liu^{1

2

5

6}, Yafeng Zhan^{1

7}, Jiaji Ren^{1

2

5}, Tianzi Jiang^{1

2

6

8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Brainnetome Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research, Beijing, China.
⁴ Sino-Danish College, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁵ School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁶ CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
⁷ School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China.
⁸ Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
⁹ Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.

Abstract

Data processing toolboxes for resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) have provided us with a variety of functions and user friendly graphic user interfaces (GUIs). However, many toolboxes only cover a certain range of functions, and use exclusively designed GUIs. To facilitate data processing and alleviate the burden of manually drawing GUIs, we have developed a versatile and extendable MATLAB-based toolbox, BRANT (BRAinNetome fmri Toolkit), with a wide range of rs-fMRI data processing functions and code-generated GUIs. During the implementation, we have also empowered the toolbox with parallel computing techniques, efficient file handling methods for compressed file format, and one-line scripting. In BRANT, users can find rs-fMRI batch processing functions for preprocessing, brain spontaneous activity analysis, functional connectivity analysis, complex network analysis, statistical analysis, and results visualization, while developers can quickly publish scripts with code-generated GUIs.

Keywords: BRANT; code-generated GUI; preprocessing; resting-state fMRI; visualization.