StarPlus fMRI data


This page contains data, software and documentation  on the fMRI data set for the StarPlus data.  This data was originally collected by Marcel Just and his colleagues in Carnegie Mellon University's CCBI.

The Experiment:

Timing: The experiment consists of a set of trials, and the data is partitioned into trials.  For some of these intervals, the subject simply rested, or gazed at a fixation point on the screen.  For other trials, the subject was shown a picture and a sentence, and instructed to press a button to indicate whether the sentence correctly described the picture.  For these trials, the sentence and picture were presented in sequence, with the picture presented first on half of the trials, and the sentence presented first on the other half of the trials.  Forty such trials are available for each subject.  The timing within each such trial is as follows:

Imaging parameters: Images were collected every 500msec. Only a fraction of the brain of each subject was imaged. The data is marked up with 25-30 anatomically defined regions (called "Regions of Interest", or ROIs).

Stimulus and behavioral data: A variety of information is available for all three data sets, including the exact sentences and pictures presented, and the subject response times.

The Data:

The data consists of  .mat files that can be directly loaded into Matlab version 7.  The data file for each human subject is approximately 100Mbytes, so be sure you are on a high-speed line before attempting to download these.   You might want to begin by downloading just the data for one of these subjects.

  1. data for subject 04847
  2. data for subject 04799
  3. data for subject 05710
  4. data for subject 04820
  5. data for subject 05675
  6. data for subject 05680
hint regarding ROI's: If you plan to train a classifier to distinguish whether the subject is viewing a picture or sentence, then you will probably find the best accuracy if you restrict your program to consider only the following Regions of Interest (ROI's):  {'CALC' 'LIPL' 'LT' 'LTRIA' 'LOPER' 'LIPS' 'LDLPFC'};

The Software:

A zipped collection of matlab functions is available to visualize and manipulate this data.  The software also includes a Gaussian Naive Bayes classifier which can be used to train classifiers over this data.

The Documentation:

The documentation includes a description of available software routines and documentation on the data structures used to represent the data.

The impulse response of fMRI activation to an impulse of neural activity is modeled in "Detection versus Estimation in Event-Related fMRI: Choosing the Optimal Stimulus Timing," R. Birn, R. Cox, and P. Bandettini, NeuroImage 15, pp. 252-264 (2002). A matlab function implementing this impulse response is available here.

Analyses of this data: are described in:


Questions or comments: email Tom.Mitchell@cmu.edu or Wei.Wang@cs.cmu.edu