StiMaRe: A software tool supporting visual stimuli definition and analysis in magnetic resonance

Analyzing physiological brain responses to external stimuli helps neuroscientists to elucidate human behaviour and, more generally improves knowledge of neurological patients profile. It is well known that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can provide important information when stimulating sensorimotor or cognitive functions in humans. In this paper we present a software tool supporting analysis of fMRI datasets. The tool allows medical operators to build sequences of stimuli that are presented to subjects within the MRI scanner and to define critical task parameters and timings. Patients feedbacks are recorded through a fiber-optic computer-controlled MR compatible system during the fMRI acquisition phase. The proposed tool, called StiMaRe (for Stimuli definition and analysis in Magnetic Resonance), includes a database layer allowing to store the defined pattern with the patient feedbacks. An XML based framework allows to distribute the pattern stimuli and results to remote sites, allowing the reissuing of the experiment on different samples.