Braph : a toolbox developed for brain graph analysis of various imaging modalities

Abstract

Complex systems, like the human brain, are composed of a huge number of interacting elements showing complex patterns. Graph theory provides a mathematical toolbox for investigating the role of each element in these systems. With the rise of interest in applying this method for studying brain networks, several software have been developed to allow researches conduct brain network analysis. However, a comprehensive and an easy-to-use toolbox is still lacking. BRAPH is the first object-oriented toolbox that provides users the ability of constructing and analyzing brain networks out of data acquired from various imaging modalities. For this purpose, multiple graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have been designed that allow the users to import or build brain atlases, along with cohort of subjects, prior to starting the graph analysis. Various graph measures for both weighted graphs and binary graphs, comparison between groups, comparison with random graphs, longitudinal analysis and statistical analysis, are only some of the analysis tools embedded in BRAPH.