What Tomorrow May Bring
On a brisk day in Boston in November 2017 , the Martinos Center hosted a daylong symposium honoring two decades of FreeSurfer . The speakers in the morning looked back on the early days of the technique — a time , said researcher David Salat , maybe slightly wistfully , when Tiger Woods was a fresh young face on the professional golf circuit and Hanson and The Spice Girls ruled the pop music landscape — and on the many successes it has seen since then . Fischl , Sereno and Greve stepped up to the podium , as did several other developers and prominent users of the software : Nancy Kanwisher and Arthur Liu as well as Salat , who emphasized the importance of FreeSurfer in his work with structural imaging of the brain during the aging process .
In the afternoon , the speakers turned their gaze to the horizon , to what might be achieved with FreeSurfer in the coming years . Here , they focused on existing applications of the software as well as ones just now emerging . Jon Polimeni spoke about its use for anatomically informed analysis of high-resolution fMRI data while Anastasia Yendiki discussed the many ways it could improve diffusion imaging and Polina Golland looked toward its ongoing use with data from stroke patients and other clinical populations . Turning to a bold new application , Mark Michalski and Jayashree Kalpathy-Cramer outlined the ways in which the software could bolster artificial intelligence and deep learning in medical imaging .
In his introductory remarks , Fischl noted that , while coding can be wildly enjoyable in and of itself , people who get into this business do so because they want to make an impact , to somehow change the world for the better . With FreeSurfer , he and the many others who have helped to expand upon and improve the software over the years have clearly already done this . And the impact they have , on biomedical research and in the world generally , will surely only continue to grow .
Scenes from the FreeSurfer Symposium . Photos by Matti Hämäläinen ( B & W ) and Caroline Magnain ( color ).
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