A highly parallelized framework for computationally intensive MR data analysis

Abstract

Object The goal of this study was to develop a comprehensive magnetic resonance (MR) data analysis framework for handling very large datasets with user-friendly tools for parallelization and to provide an example implementation. Materials and methods Commonly used software packages (AFNI, FSL, SPM) were connected via a framework based on the free software environment R, with the possibility of using Nvidia CUDA GPU processing integrated for high-speed linear algebra operations in R. Three hundred single-subject datasets from the 1,000 Functional Connectomes project were used to demonstrate the capabilities of the framework. Results A framework for easy implementation of processing pipelines was developed and an R package for the example implementation of Fully Exploratory Network ICA was compiled. Test runs on data from 300 subjects demonstrated the computational advantages of a processing pipeline developed using the framework compared to non-parallelized processing, reducing computation time by a factor of 15. Conclusion The feasibility of computationally intensive exploratory analyses allows broader access to the tools for discovery science.