Samara University Scientists Сreated a Worldwide Software Package for Brain Research

Scientists of Samara National Research University together with Russian and foreign colleagues developed an open source software package for conducting scientific research in the field of brain function. The OpenNFT.org software platform, which makes it possible to see and analyse brain activity in real time, has already been tested and is used in a number of well-known universities and research centers of the world. A special seminar, dedicated to the work of the platform and the latest innovative changes of the software package, was conducted by  Samara University scientists together with the colleagues from the USA and Great Britain at the international scientific conference rtFIN-2019 (Real-Time Functional Imaging and Neurofeedback) in Aachen (Germany) on December 7th.

The platform was jointly developed together with the specialists from the Image Processing Systems institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yale University (USA), Imperial College London, the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne and the University of Zurich (Switzerland).

OpenNFT.org is designed to conduct research related to the formation of neurobiological feedback and it operates on the basis of an MRI scanner. During the experiments, the person in the scanner receives any information, for example, he sees images, hears sounds. Meanwhile, using Samara development, scientists receive and analyse scans of his brain activity with a spatial resolution of 1 mm. The software package compares which areas of the brain react to a particular stimulus and how they interact with each other.

“We can understand how a person perceives this or that image, how he controls his emotions. The development allows us to solve a huge number of problems, including neurorehabilitation of people after a stroke", – said Professor of Samara University Supercomputers and General Informatics Department Artem Nikonorov. 

According to him, this Samara software package has a counterpart known in the world – this is the Western Turbo-BrainVoyager (Turbo-Brain Voyager) platform, but it is chargeable and closed. And if the question of its price (about 20 thousand euros) is not a particular problem for rich foreign universities, the inaccessibility of the platform sometimes prevents scientists from their research, limiting their freedom of action. Its open character and the possibility of modification represent the greatest advantages of OpenNFT.org.

"This is the only open platform of such kind in the world. It is free and extensible, which allows research teams to freely adapt it to their goals, write the necessary plugins for it. The platform works on all types of modern MRI scanners", – said Nikonorov.

The platform is already used successfully in research projects of world scientific centres in Switzerland, the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Spain. For example, in Switzerland, this Samara development is involved in the laboratory of neuroeconomics –  this is an interdisciplinary area at the interface of economic theory, neurobiology and psychology, studying the decision-making process when choosing alternative options, sharing risk and reward.

In Switzerland, the OpenNFT.org platform has been recently adopted by the neuropediatrics laboratory. As a result, some time later Samara scientists added a new option to the program – "quality control". This is due to the fact that during the examination in an MRI scanner children often begin to turn their heads, move, and the readings are distorted, so the correlation of errors is necessary. 

For reference:

The principles of OpenNFT.org are described in the publication: Y.Koush et al., OpenNFT: An open-source Python/Matlab framework for real-time fMRI neurofeedback training based on activity, connectivity and multivariate pattern analysis, Neuroimage, 2017.

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