By Professor Joanna Wardlaw, Director, Brain Research Imaging Centre.

Image analysis software is central to research with medical imaging data such as brain scans to provide quantitative measures for use in statistical comparisons, to segment particular tissues of interest and for display purposes. Although imaging is now a central tool for medical, particularly neurosciences research, it has not been around for very long so image analysis tools are constantly developing.

The Brain Research Imaging Centre has developed various image analysis tools over the years to tackle the particular research problems that we face in common neurological diseases like stroke, multiple sclerosis, dementia, psychiatric disorders and ageing. We had tried for several years to find a way to place our software in the public domain as downloadable tools for others to use and pretty much failed. The whole process is complex, time consuming and requires in depth knowledge of licensing and other factors that you only find out about through experience.

The Software Sustainability Institute provided all that experience and turned what had been an extremely painful process into a highly productive and rewarding one. We now have two really valuable software programmes available on the BRIC website freely available for anyone in the world to use, as well as for our own staff and students. One tool anonymises imaging data in a very clever way (essential for human research) and the other allows the brain to be separated into its different component tissues for analysis (a fundamental step in a large proportion of neuroimaging work).

The developers are getting useful feedback as others use the tools and the reward of seeing their work more widely recognised. Proving useful and easy to access tools like this also raises the profile of the BRIC and University of Edinburgh which has added benefits in terms of general kudos, success with grants and (we think!) an easier route to publication of work using these analysis tools as now they are already known to reviewers. Thank you to the Software Sustainability Institute!