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INTEREST: Doctors turn to iPods and open source to cut costs
by billing 06 Mar '05

06 Mar '05

...from: http://hardware.silicon.com/storage/0,39024649,39127655,00.htm Doctors turn to iPods and open source to cut costs February 07 2005 by Jo Best Apple is doctors' orders for storage While Apple is riding high on the sales of the iPod, the iconic music player is morphing into a business tool: radiologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), are teaming the devices with an open source platform to help the medical community cut costs. UCLA's Dr Osman Ratib, whose background is in medical imaging, wanted to find a way to sidestep the $100,000 workstations needed to view high resolution images that required 3D rendering. With help from programmer and fellow radiologist Dr Antoine Rosset, he created OsiriX, an open source application, to enable radiologists to teleconference with the images on Mac desktop systems. "The platform has similar functionality [to the high-end workstations], it's accessible to the rest of the medical community and you don't have to spend $100,000, $200,000 to view the images," Ratib said. He added that he was a "strong advocate" of the open source development model. The doctors were able to build the software using ready-made components and add the environment and interface themselves. "It took nine months to create... the platform. It very quickly took off," he said. "Before we'd showed it in any meeting, we had hundreds and very soon thousands of users." When it came time to find a way to store the high-res images, Ratib turned to another Apple staple - the iPod. Ratib told silicon.com: "It was difficult finding enough space on the hard disc to keep image sets... They don't fit on discs, they don't fit on memory sticks." "It's amazing - [with iPods] people are carrying around 60GB in their pocket when I don't even have 60GB on my computer," he said. "That's the beauty of adopting consumer technology." As well as using the iPod for storing the image sets, Ratib adapted the software to cope with the iPod photo after its release in December, giving medical staff a "cute, sexy" way to show images to other personnel. Despite warnings from analysts that all removeable storage - including the iPod - is a security risk - Dr Ratib said that using an iPod doesn't present an additional inherent security risk. "It's not the device, it's how you use it... I don't think an iPod has any different risk to any informatics device. We strongly recommended to anonymise the data," Ratib said. "When [users] are outside the institution, they can be compliant or not, depending on their behaviour. It's not different to copying it to CD or memory discs." While Ratib described the medical profession as "a little more traditional in adopting technology," the software is also enabling medical workers to start working remotely; the software is compatible with Apple's videoconferencing software, so physicians can see and share medical images. "We rigged the software to mimic the camera... it basically shows what's on your screen" to other iChat users, Ratib said. "We were that close to having Steve Jobs presenting it as a feature in the San Francisco keynote," Ratib said.

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iLife ‘05 and Beyond & Audio Production Seminars
by Doug Hamilton 20 Feb '05

20 Feb '05

Sign up for one or both of these FREE seminars from Apple. iLife ‘05 and Beyond Apple has begun 2005 with an explosion of new revolutionary technology solutions. Attend this half-day seminar and discover all the amazing new software and hardware announcements made recently at the MacWorld Expo 2005. In this in-depth seminar learn about iLife '05, iWork, iPod Shuffle, and the all new Mac Mini. Attend this fun and informative seminar to discover how to supercharge your digital lifestyle. What You Will Learn ---------------------- • Why the Mac is the best computer for organizing and sharing digital photos • How easy it is to make movies with music, video and your digital photos • How to create your own music with amazing built-in realistic software instruments and record your next opus • How to enjoy a life ‘more random’ with the new iPod Shuffle • How to achieve new levels of style and flair in your next word processing document or presentation • That you can switch to the Mac or add to your Macintosh family for less than ever before Featured Products ------------------- • iLife '05: iPhoto 5, iMovie HD, iTunes 4.7, iDVD 5, and GarageBand 2 • Mac OS X "Panther" • iWork • iPod Shuffle • Mac Mini • Power Macintosh G5 • Apple Cinema Displays Who Should Attend -------------------- • Anyone who wants to capture and share exciting moments and create lasting memories • Beginners as well as individuals who already have some basic familiarity with digital media • Aspiring or recreational music hobbyist • PC users looking to an alternative to Windows Dates and Locations* ----------------------- Calgary, AB March 3 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Edmonton, AB March 1 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Markham, ON March 1 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Markham, ON March 22 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Saskatoon, SK March 10 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Winnipeg, MB March 8 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Seating is limited, so register today! Register online at: http://www.seminars.apple.com/goToSeries.html?id=5244 Audio Production Ecosystem Apple has become the premiere platform for Digital Music Creation. Learn how Mac OS X Panther provides an incredible platform for the audio professional with technologies such as Core Audio, Audio Units, and Native Midi. Enjoy a rare behind-the-scene look at various audio technologies unique to Apple and how to take your music making experience to whole new level. Learn about the Audio Production Ecosystem - the environment which combines Mac OS X, Power Macintosh G5, Logic Pro 7, and a host of incredible third-party audio technologies into the most powerful native music making system. Gain an understanding on how audio design on the Mac connects to video, film and DVD as an incredible tool in any production workflow. What You Will Learn ---------------------- • Why the Mac is the ultimate platform for digital music creation • About Core Audio, Audio Units, and other technologies built into Mac OS X for the audio professional • The power of 64 bit processing via the Power Macintosh G5 for digital music creation • How Mac OS X connects to the most popular third party hardware and software solutions to expand your music pallet • How to pump up your next jam with the popular Jam Packs 1,2,3,4 • How to use your Mac in the broadcast workflow or to score your next motion picture • Why it is a perfect time to switch to the Macintosh for music creation Featured Products ------------------- • Mac OS X "Panther" • Logic Pro 7 • DVD Studio Pro • Final Cut Pro • Motion • Logic Express • GarageBand 2 • Mac Mini • Power Macintosh G5 • Apple Cinema Displays • Popular third party products featured: FXpansion, Arturia, Native Instruments, Spectrasonics, Edirol, RME, M-Audio, Brian Moore Guitars Who Should Attend -------------------- • Aspiring or professionals in audio/music creation • PC music making users looking to an alternative to Windows • Broadcast, or Film Composers Dates and Locations* ----------------------- Calgary AB March 3 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Edmonton AB March 1 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Saskatoon SK March 10 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Winnipeg MB March 8 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Seating is limited, so register today! Register online at: http://www.seminars.apple.com/goToSeries.html?id=5243 ------------- *Date, time, location, speakers, and content may change without notice. Copyright © 2005 Apple Computer, Inc. All rights reserved.

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FYI: Apple online seminars: Application Performance and High Performance Computing Solutions
by billing 31 Jan '05

31 Jan '05

In March, Apple is giving two online seminars (you may need to install a small application to participate if you have not been part of one of these seminars in the past). More details and registration information can be found at the URL given. Internet Mar 10, 2005 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM LIVE WEBCAST: Maximizing Mac OS X Application Performance For General Audiences In this webcast, you'll learn the basics of optimization, including how and why every developer should turn a critical eye to the code they've just written. For more details: http://seminars.apple.com/goToEvent.html?id=32726&s=300 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Internet Mar 29, 2005 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM LIVE WEBCAST: Third-party HPC Solutions for Mac OS X For General Audiences Apple will be joined by representatives from companies who develop their software or hardware for the platform to talk about their products. For more details: http://seminars.apple.com/goToEvent.html?id=32748&s=300 Wayne

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Apple Webcast TODAY - Digital Academic Television Network
by Doug Hamilton 19 Jan '05

19 Jan '05

Hi Everyone: Sorry for the short notice. The Mac OS X Labs group (now Mac Enterprise) sponsored by Apple Computer Inc. is having a webcast today: **http://macenterprise.org/content/blogcategory/97/125/** **** **This webcast will discuss the implementation of the **University of Wisconsin-Madison DATN (Digital Academic Television Network), pronounced "Dayton". Regards, Doug

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INTEREST: dipping into Tiger... Now.
by billing 17 Jan '05

17 Jan '05

Apple's "Developer Connection" site has a few articles which give some good insight into some of the upcoming new technology to be included with Tiger. Mac OS X v.10.4 Tiger Overview: New features, APIs, and frameworks. Working with Spotlight: Powerful search technologies available to developers. Developing Dashboard Widgets: Powerful mini-applications that are quick and easy to develop. Developing 64-bit Applications: Mac OS X Tiger breaks the limitations of 32-bit computing. Working with Automator: Extend the value of your application with Automator Actions and Workflows. For example, here's a bit of the "Dashboard" documentation that talk about how to construct Dashboard's Widget's: ============================ http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/dashboard.html What's Inside a Widget? At its simplest, a Widget is simply a web page that is displayed in the Dashboard rather than in a browser, such as Safari. A Widget is contained on disk in a bundle—a directory that groups all the needed resources for the Widget together in one place. Widget bundles are named with the .wdgt extension. Like any other bundle, a Widget's bundle is managed by the Finder as a single entity. A basic Widget contains the following files: ▪ A main HTML file defining the user-interface for the Widget. ▪ A default background image in PNG format that can be displayed by Dashboard while it loads the Widget. The PNG format is used because of its excellent support for alpha channel transparency. ▪ A property list file named Info.plist that contains a Widget's identifier, name, version information, size, and the main HTML page as well as other optional information used by Dashboard. • Develop widgets using industry-standard web technologies—HTML, JavaScript, and CSS • Create a widget using only a text editor and browser, such as TextEdit and Safari ================= ...another example comes from the "Automator" documentation: ======================== http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/automator.html Using Automator Automator comes preloaded with a large library of Actions. These Actions expose functionality built into the operating system, such as finding files with Spotlight, or the various applications that ship with the system, such as iPhoto, Mail, and iCal. There are also Actions that let you write shell scripts and AppleScripts. You can use these Actions to rename a group of files, create a new event in an iCal calendar, or to resize an image. This library of Actions is accessed and organized on the left hand side of the Automator window. To assemble a Workflow from a set of Actions, simply drag-and-drop the Actions from the library into the sequence in which you want them to run. Each Action in the Workflow corresponds to an individual step that you would need to perform manually. Each Action comes with a small GUI panel that lets you tweak its options and settings. Automator shows these panels connected, along with the types of data that are flowing from one Action to another.

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FYI: Infoworld says Apple "Best Server HW" and "Best OS" in 2004
by billing 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

Happy New Year, all. Wayne ...from: http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/12/30/01FEtoyplats_1.html?s=feature Innovation trumps commoditization Worthwhile platform and architecture choices abound By Tom Yager December 30, 2004 In 2004, we started seeing the products of engineering that went on underground during the recession. Whereas the market as a whole is doing the wait-and-see, early adopters are partying their butts off over true competition in operating systems and CPU architectures, the long-delayed delivery of the Java promise, and the essential paradigm shift from fast processors to fast throughput. Much of the technology that vendors were forced to put in the deep freeze has thawed. In 2005, the rest of IT will see why those forward-looking geeks (present company included) are so giddy. First, Sun rescued Java by becoming honestly and deeply engaged with the grassroots Java developer community. The impact of the fulfillment of the Java promise extends well beyond open source and academia. Oracle (Profile, Products, Articles) stands out as an example: The vendor now offers its entire commercial Java product line for free download. Oracle permits license-free use of its software for development and testing. You pay only when you deploy, and then only when you deploy to an Oracle-branded server. Expect to see more of the “develop now, pay later” approach to platform promotion in 2005. PLATFORMS: BEST SERVER HARDWARE Apple Xserve G5: Tightly integrated hardware/OS combo raises the bar for other server makers BEST BLADE SYSTEM HP Consolidated Client Infrastructure: Combines popular management tools with unrivaled reliability and scalability BEST OPERATING SYSTEM Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther): Continues to set the standard for simplicity and ease-of-use among 64-bit-capable OSes BEST VIRTUAL SERVER VMware ESX Server 2.1.1: Enables an extraordinary array of high-availability services and management capabilities [...]

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INTEREST: Oracle "OKs" Apple storage XRAID;
by billing 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

...from: http://news.com.com/Oracle+uses+Apple+storage+gear/2100-1015_3 -5480045.html Oracle uses Apple storage gear Published: December 6, 2004, 3:21 PM PST By Ina Fried Staff Writer, CNET News.com Apple Computer's rack-mounted storage system received a vote of confidence Monday, with database giant Oracle endorsing the Xserve RAID as part of an initiative to cut storage costs. Oracle has identified the Apple product as one of several storage systems that would make a good low-cost alternative to the types of high-end monolithic storage systems that have traditionally been used to store Oracle databases. Additionally, Oracle is using the Xserve RAID in its own technology department to store e-mail, voice mail and calendar information. Oracle is using the Xserve RAID for a task once reserved for pricier Fibre Channel-based disk arrays. The software giant noted in a white paper that the Apple approach was about three times lower on a cost-per-megabyte basis. "Its performance is excellent," Oracle said in the document. Apple said Oracle plans to use 50 to 100 terabytes of Apple storage. Apple itself has been shifting much of its data storage capacity from EMC and IBM systems onto Xserve RAID. In addition to Apple's storage box, Oracle also identified systems from HP, NetApp, EMC/Dell and Engenio as suitable candidates for its Resilient Low Cost Storage Initiative. Meanwhile, Apple also said Oracle is moving ahead with previously announced plans to offer its 10g software for the Mac sometime before the end of the year. Apple hopes the ability of Oracle's software to run on Mac servers will not only lead some businesses to move to the Mac but also help the Mac appeal to many of those developing their own applications that run on top of Oracle's software. "That opens the door to a lot of people that maybe have not looked at the Mac platform," said Brian Croll, a senior director of worldwide software product marketing for Apple. In addition to support from Oracle, Apple also plans to have its own $999 storage file system software, dubbed Xsan, available shortly. The software is still on track to be launched this fall, Apple said, giving the company about two weeks to apply the finishing touches and start shipping.

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INTEREST: Google Adding Major Libraries to Database
by billing 14 Dec '04

14 Dec '04

...from: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/technology/14google.html? oref=login&th Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database By JOHN MARKOFF and EDWARD WYATT Published: December 14, 2004 [...] It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Oxford, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections. [...]

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FYI: LIVE WEBCAST: Getting Started with High Performance Computing
by billing 09 Dec '04

09 Dec '04

Internet Dec 16, 2004 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM LIVE WEBCAST: Getting Started with High Performance Computing For General Audiences Webcast to discuss high-level concepts of HPC, issues and obstacles in setting up and using clusters, and to show some shortcuts you can take in the process. For more details and to register, please visit: http://seminars.apple.com/goToEvent.html?id=31886&s=300 ------------------- Presenters: • Elizabeth Kerr, Ph.D., Director of Worldwide Science and Technology Markets, Apple • Pear Urushima, Manager of Scientific Markets, Apple • Douglas Brooks, Product Manager for Xserve, Apple • Matt MacInnis, Manager of Research Computing, Apple Topics: • Types of applications used on HPC systems • High level concepts of deploying your own HPC systems and software • Types of clusters, and how to choose a model that works for you • The Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics • Customer case studies and examples • Live question and answer with webcast attendees Products to be discussed: • Xserve G5 and the Xserve G5 Cluster Node • Xserve RAID • The Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics • MATLAB and gridMathematica Who should view this webcast: • Scientists and engineers who need more computational power • IT managers who support HPC deployments and scientific computing environments • Lab or department research managers • Directors of research groups who want to expand their computational capabilities Logistics: 1-Register at the HPC Webcast Series Page 2-Install CAST:STREAM player 2.0 (or higher). Prior software installation and setup required.

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INTEREST: Neurolens (on G5): modernizing brain imaging software
by billing 03 Nov '04

03 Nov '04

http://www.neurolens.org ...from: http://developer.apple.com/business/macmarket/neurolens.html NeuroLens is a faster, more powerful, user-friendlier brain imaging application that owes its existence both to the insight of Rick Hoge, its developer, and to the unique features of the Macintosh platform. A Mac is a powerful and versatile tool in the life sciences—from the UNIX core of Mac OS X and the power of the G5 processor, to the Xcode Tools and the Mac’s native graphics capabilities. It’s a platform that lets researchers focus on their work instead of learning programming and waiting for results. Many of the previous brain imaging applications used by Rick and his collaborators were written for an earlier generation of computer workstations with performance and memory limitations that are now archaic. Rick and his team saw the opportunity with Mac OS X to develop an imaging application with modern computer performance parameters in mind. “The Apple platform is the largest installed base of any UNIX variant,” Rick explains. “In addition, it is extremely prevalent in the life sciences, and increasing in popularity and in adoptions in neuroimaging labs. It was perfect for what we needed to accomplish.” The result is NeuroLens, an integrated visualization and analysis package for quantitative physiological neuroimaging, now in public Beta. It is a research imaging tool that is easy to use, intuitive, and has the capabilities to analyze and combine data from many different sources in forms that are extremely useful for researchers. NeuroLens was developed by Hoge at the A. A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Charlestown, Mass. Rick is a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School, Department of Radiology, whose interests focus on cerebrovascular physiology and the physics of how this affects the signal screen seen in MRI scans. The application is targeted specifically at the research community, who works with large data sets—neurologists, biologists, and neuropsychologists, all doing basic research on brain function. The work is funded by the Office of National Drug Control Policy as part of a project to understand the genetic bases of addiction and depression. Discovering a Familiar UNIX Environment on Mac OS X “We were using UNIX software systems, and when Mac OS X arrived with its UNIX core, we realized that this was an ideal development opportunity,” Hoge explains. “Apple has a strong commitment to consumer-oriented systems that are easy to use, and we needed a program that eliminated the need for users to learn advanced UNIX concepts. In addition, many life sciences folks have Macs already, and UNIX was familiar to the developers.” First, Rick ported their current UNIX code to Mac OS X, which worked easily. The entire imaging team was very happy to have their UNIX applications on the same machine as their word processing and email programs. He adds, “But we saw immediately how outdated our application interfaces were after running these X11 applications side-by-side with Cocoa applications on Mac OS X. While the Mac became our new UNIX workstation, our legacy Unix applications were missing out on the huge performance boost offered by the AltiVec processor, and the advanced user interface refinements available through Cocoa.” The next logical step then was to design an application that could take advantage of this new platform. Advantages of Mac OS X Development It was an easy choice for Rick to chose Mac OS X as the development platform for NeuroLens, a well-engineered, high performance application, using the variety of Mac OS X development tools and performance capabilities, not just its UNIX APIs. Some of the many advantages of developing NeuroLens on the Mac included: ▪ A very refined user interface—NeuroLens was created using the Xcode Tools, especially Interface Builder, with very little work on the part of the developers. ▪ The highly optimized image and signal processing routines that Apple has developed for its successful consumer multimedia products are perfect for the requirements they have in medical imaging performance. ▪ Familiar, trusted UNIX APIs available under the hood, so that previous functionality was not wasted. ▪ Powerful tools like Xcode and Cocoa that made it possible to develop full-powered applications quickly, with a wide range of functionality, without writing a lot of code. Cocoa Makes Development Easy “We were extremely impressed with the Mac OS X development tools,” Rick says. “We ran through Cocoa tutorials initially and found them remarkable—in relatively short order I went from having nothing to having a complicated application, with very little effort on my part. I realized then that I could write a complicated imaging application with little work and taking advantage of the extremely fast performance of the OS, as well as its graphics and multimedia capabilities.” “The appeal of Cocoa for science users is that Objective-C is a simple superset of standard C, and it is easy to drop in or integrate existing C code or algorithms (unlike using Java, which would otherwise be another excellent choice for an imaging application), while also producing a great user interface,” Rick adds. “Interface Builder made it easy to build polished user interfaces, and features like Cocoa bindings made it easy to link the interfaces to program logic.” The integration of old code into the existing Mac OS X development framework is supported by Cocoa, rather than keeping it separated, which results in code that is easier to maintain, and that has a better user interface. “ It’s really all about ease of use,” he summarizes. “We made sure that we used the Apple Human Interface Guidelines when designing the NeuroLens interface, and that was extremely helpful.” The NeuroLens application is designed such that all processing operations (actions that take one or more datasets read from disk as input to generate a new dataset as output) are implemented as plugins. Plugin bundles for some standard processing operations are included within the application bundle for NeuroLens, and researchers can write their own plugins to extend the functionality of NeuroLens. To make this easy, Hoge wrote a template which, when installed, allows a developer to create a new Xcode project containing a skeletal but fully functional plugin complete with a basic user interface. Development using Xcode also gives users the ability to get data easily from the program into other documents. Brain images from NeuroLens can be dragged and dropped into Microsoft Word documents, emails, or presentations. Graphs of brain signals can be easily copied and pasted. “Cocoa makes it very easy to go from image display in the visualization environment to export of high quality graphics for presentation,” Rick says. “Because of the deep integration of PDF into the operating system and Cocoa frameworks, it’s very easy to drag a graph from the visualizer into a Keynote presentation as a high-quality vector PDF representation with nice anti-aliased fonts. This was very difficult in older UNIX/X11 apps in which typically we were limited to making a bitmap screen grab of a plot. And all this can be achieved with relatively little developer effort using the standard drag-and-drop/cut-and-paste interface familiar to Mac users.” By redesigning data structures from scratch based on the memory capacity of modern computers, it was possible to alleviate much of the disk I/O inherent in older applications and also keep more data in contiguous memory—greatly improving cache performance and memory efficiency. This would accelerate performance on any platform, but the additional performance gains afforded by adapting code for linear algebra and DSP functions to use the AltiVec processor—the 128-bit vector processing unit available on G4 and G5 chips that permits math operations to be done in parallel—resulted in an unprecedented level of performance. NeuroLens Solves Command Line Woes Much of the imaging software in common use now was first developed in the mid-1990s, by physicists using difficult-to-use UNIX command-line code. The engineering behind that software is now dated, focusing on things like a small memory footprint—performance bottlenecks were completely different than they are with current systems. Today, brain imaging software is being developed primarily by people in the life sciences and psychology, rather than physicists, and the training costs for them to come up to speed on this older software (as they frequently do not have UNIX or programming backgrounds) is quite high. NeuroLens takes care of these issues. “It can be challenging for a developer or researcher to deal with all the housekeeping associated with file formats and accurate visualization,” Rick says. There is often need to write custom code for data analysis, and the custom Xcode template allows them to do that without having to worry about detailed programming or how the data is arranged on disk or how to display it. With the Xcode template, a grad student who wants to perform a custom processing operation on a dataset can just create a new project in Xcode and immediately gain access to simple data structures. This allows anyone with a reasonable background in programming C to implement their algorithm. Hoge explains, “Such customization provides the developer/researcher with ‘free’ access to multiple complex file formats like DICOM, MINC, as well as Analyze and AFNI, and provides an automatic display of results and the ability to save them to disk. “We plan to release NeuroLens under an open source license and distribute an Xcode template with it so that users can create custom plug-in models with very little work, specific to their own research needs,” says Hoge. Better Interoperability with Multiple File Formats Most older programs were also written for specific labs that used only a few file formats and so tend to be very restrictive about what formats they will support. Rick designed NeuroLens much like [Adobe] Photoshop—it can read many data storage formats and get it into the program. Cocoa provides the architecture to support this—achieving that kind of broad functionality makes NeuroLens very useful in conjunction with other packages, allowing researchers to use NeuroLens’ remarkable imaging capabilities with data sets generated by other applications without having to convert file formats on the command line. “We focused on interoperability,” Rick explains. “In some instances, NeuroLens will be used for its front end to read three dimensional surface images of the brain with another program. In this way, it doesn’t replace other tools, but can be used in conjunction with them. The user interface we developed through Xcode makes the NeuroLens viewing environment much easier to use than our previous generation of software.” Faster Imaging with NeuroLens Brain imaging from MRI studies result in a series of three-dimensional images. Image analysis generally consists of image processing steps for data quality improvement, followed by statistical analysis to identify regions of brain activation during a task or stimulus that was applied when the subject was scanned. “For example,” Rick says, “a series of 3D images must be aligned to reduce the effect of subject motion and are often spatially smoothed in 3D to improve signal-to-noise ratio. Using the improved data structures, AltiVec-based processing routines, and the interactive workflow of Mac OS X, tasks that might have taken half an hour in the past can now be done in seconds. “Because of increases in speed, we can use interfaces that get away from the batch job approach that was required in the past when many operations took overnight. “This makes the processing more transparent to users—it’s like a Photoshop session where you might do a series of steps on a photo and save the results. At the same time, we use Cocoa’s strong XML support to embed detailed history about acquisition and processing in the output data files.” The end result is that NeuroLens bridges a large workflow obstacle by allowing a process that was often interrupted for minutes or sometimes hours to be done continuously. This creates a more logical process for researchers, and the performance means that users achieve a new level of interactivity with the work, resulting in more detailed quality assurance than was previously possible with such interrupted workflows. With the new level of interactivity, there is greater ability to spot problems with data that may occur at the time of acquisition (such as scanner spiking or excessive subject movement), and this immediacy allows users to understand the impact of various processing settings much more intuitively than in the past. “This has been a great teaching tool for us,” Rick explains, “as it allows students to get a grasp of the purpose of processing steps and how various parameters affect the end result. It is also very useful not to have to spend several hours or more getting students up to speed on how to use the UNIX command line. Mac OS X allowed us to create an extremely user-friendly and intuitive interface.” In addition, MRIs can produce both detailed structural and functional information, by showing images of the brain as well as its activity over time. NeuroLens allows researchers to overlay function on top of structure in one image, as well as putting the data into graphs, showing brain response over time. NeuroLens allows researchers to manipulate the basic data set in various ways, using Mac OS X functionality: extracting brain scan images for papers, producing graphs from data analysis of response signals. For more information on NeuroLens, see the NeuroLens Website at http://www.neurolens.org.

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