3 ms·
Agreed about the horrible tools. Unfortunately, this is an extremely difficult market to break into. Most academics want free and open source tools and don't ca
by cantastoria 14y ago
Agreed about the horrible tools. Unfortunately, this is an extremely difficult market to break into. Most academics want free and open source tools and don't care how many research assistants or post-docs they have to torture to use them. Compounding the problem is that the market is so small any commercial product is going to have to be very expensive (>$1000.00) to make it worth while re: development and support costs. For instance something like BrainVoyager (http://www.brainvoyager.com/ http://www.brainvoyager.com/) which is a commercial competitor the tools you listed starts at $4,000 which is a pretty good chunk of any equipment budget on a grant.
- fluidcruft 14y agoBrainVoyager's approaches are from the ice age and not flexible enough to handle modern protocols. Only a moron could defend using it for research. It's tranlational at best (a toy you give those clinicians that can't even figure out SPM). But it does make pretty pictures.
- phren0logy 14y agoI'm a clinician and it admittedly took me ages to figure out SPM. I still hate it, and think it is terrible to work with but useful. The state of the software is actively hampering contributions from clinicians. The problem is, as you have pointed out, that if BrainVoyager is the alternative, that's no alternative at all.
- cantastoria 14y agoI'm not defending BrainVoyager as a product. It was just an example of the type of business model the academic market requires.
- simonster 14y agoClosed-source tools are also problematic for research purposes, since at some point in your career you will almost certainly want to run an analysis that they can't perform.