There’s plenty of medical image format viewers and brain viewers in particular, however there seemed to be a niche for a small, efficient brain connectivity viewer having all the necessary features for comprehensive and appealing presentation of dynamic causal modelling results, resting-state connectivity or statistical longitudinal coupling (novel work by one of my lab colleagues). Therefore, with enormous help of the VTK library, I decided to create BCV (Brain Connectivity Viewer – a play on the acronym BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudois – my local bank 😉 ). It ended up being a bit bloated by the presence of VTK but at the same time it turned out as surprisingly complete. It supports:
– Nifti images with different data types – signed/unsigned 8,16,32,64-bit integers, single and double precision floating-point numbers
– Volumetric rendering of 8-bit and 16-bit unsigned integer Nifti files
– Color/transparency transfer function
– Marching cubes for rendering multiple surface images
– Rendering connections either between user-specified atlas regions or real-world coordinates
– Stereo rendering (all modes supported by VTK – anaglyph, checkerboard, crystaleyes, dresden, interlaced, red/blue, horizontal split)
– Customizable connection width, color, selection color
– Customizable surface color and smoothing factor
I wish you enjoy it in your research work and/or education. It works perfectly with images generated by SPM8.
DOWNLOAD: bcv_release.zip
Note: If there’s a .txt file with the same name stem as the atlas you’re using next to it and it has the following format:
1 Precentral_L 2 Precentral_R 3 Frontal_Sup_L 4 Frontal_Sup_R 5 Frontal_Sup_Orb_L 6 Frontal_Sup_Orb_R ... etc ...
those names on the right will appear in the list of connections instead of region numbers. If there’s no atlas at all, real world coordinates in [mm] will appear.