A GPU accelerated interactive interface for exploratory functional connectivity analysis of FMRI data

Functional connectivity analysis is a way to investigate how different parts of the brain are connected and interact. A common measure of connectivity is the temporal correlation between a reference voxel time series and all the other time series in a functional MRI data set. An fMRI data set generally contains more than 20,000 within-brain voxels, making a complete correlation analysis between all possible combinations of voxels heavy to compute, store, visualize and explore. In this paper, a GPU-accelerated interactive tool for investigating functional connectivity in fMRI data is presented. A reference voxel can be moved by the user and the correlations to all other voxels are calculated in real-time using the graphics processing unit (GPU). The resulting correlation map is updated in real-time and visualized as a 3D volume rendering together with a high resolution anatomical volume. This tool greatly facilitates the search for interesting connectivity patterns in the brain