neuromaps plugin

Authors: Le Thuy Duong Nguyen, Raymundo Cassani

This tutorial introduces...

Introduction

The neuromaps plugin in Brainstorm integrates curated annotations and tools from neuromaps to further expand the accessibility and inclusivity of brain-mapping tools, as part of an Open Science initiative. Our goal is to extend these pioneering tools, which were offered exclusively in Python, to the Brainstorm MATLAB environment to provide researchers access to cutting-edge research without any prior computer programming experience, in an intuitive point-and-click user environment. As technological and data sharing advances have increasingly moved neuroscience research towards integrative questions rooted in data science, we believe that Open Science is most impactful when everyone is provided with equal access to the newest and greatest resources in the field.

The present tutorial will demonstrate the plugin’s functionality within the Brainstorm interface; for a detailed breakdown of the algorithm, please refer to the neuromaps plugin Github.

For this first iteration, we focused on the neurotransmitter receptors and transporters. Thirty different maps from the neuromaps toolbox were selected, covering nine different neurotransmitter systems: dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, acetylcholine, glutamate, GABA, histamine, cannabinoid, and opioid. These maps are sourced from open-access repositories, addressing the need for a comprehensive tool that integrates standardized analytic workflows for both surface and volumetric data.

Key Features

Importing and running neuromaps

Viewing the maps

Accessing annotation parameters

Performing statistical analyses

Summary

Acknowledgements