ExploreASL

Description

The software provides a complete head-to-tail approach that runs fully automatically, encompassing all necessary tasks from data import and structural segmentation, registration, and normalization, up to CBF quantification. In addition, the software package includes quality control (QC) procedures and region-of-interest (ROI) as well as voxel-wise analysis of the extracted data. To date, ExploreASL has been used for processing ~10000 ASL datasets from all major MRI vendors and ASL sequences and a variety of patient populations, representing ~30 studies. The ultimate goal of ExploreASL is to combine data from multiple studies to identify disease-related perfusion patterns that may prove crucial in using ASL as a diagnostic tool and enhance our understanding of the interplay of perfusion and structural changes in neurodegenerative pathophysiology.

Additionally, this (semi-)automatic pipeline allows us to minimize manual intervention, which increases the reproducibility of studies.

Documentation

Reference manual and tutorials for each ExploreASL version are found on the GitHub website. A general description of ExploreASL is in the Neuroimage paper. Additional resources are on the ExploreASL website including the walkthrough document and how-to videos, but these are not regularly updated with new versions. For any help please use the GitHub Discussion or contact the ExploreASL team at exploreasl.lab@gmail.com.

Installation

To use ExploreASL within Matlab, you can download a stable release version from the GitHub releases section or from Zenodo. Alternatively the software can also be found on Dockerhub. Navigate within Matlab to the ExporeASL directory, to make ExploreASL the current working directory. To start ExploreASL from Matlab, type:

ExploreASL