We are happy to announce the latest release of CONN (19b), which can be downloaded from its usual NITRC site (www.nitrc.org/projects/conn)
CONN is a comprehensive SPM toolbox for resting state or task-based functional connectivity MRI analyses. CONN's latest release brings a novel implementation of TFCE (Threshold Free Cluster Enhancement, Smith & Nichols 2009) that can be used for voxel-based, surface-based, as well as ROI-to-ROI second-level analyses, increased compatibility with fMRIPrep preprocessing pipeline, new methods for cluster-based inferences for ROI-to-ROI connectivity matrices based on FNC (Functional Network Connectivity, Jafri et al. 2008) and SPC (Spatial Pairwise Clustering, Zalesky et al. 2012), the ability to define and estimate hierarchical multi-level models, and many other smaller fixes and improvements.
In addition, if you are working with fMRI activation designs but would still like to apply some of CONN's preprocessing pipelines to your own data (including SPM preprocessing functions as well as novel denoising procedures such as aCompCor and scrubbing), this release makes that very simple using CONN's "preprocessing" modular functions (see "fMRI preprocessing pipeline" section in conn-toolbox.org). Similarly, CONN "glm" module will allow you to run second-level General Linear Model analyses on arbitrary data sources, while choosing between a variety of FWE-control procedures including SPM's Worsley et al. Gaussian Field Theory cluster-level statistics, Bullmore et al. randomization/permutation analyses, and Smith&Nichols TFCE statistics (see "cluster-level inferences" at conn-toolbox.org for additional details and examples)
We are also happy to announce our new reference handbook with an updated description of all current fMRI methods in CONN, which can be read or downloaded from https://www.conn-toolbox.org/fmri-methods. And of course if you are interested come and join us for our next workshop at MGH (www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/Learning_The_CONN_Toolbox) to hear all about CONN's functionality and general topics in the analysis of functional connectivity data.
As always, please send us your feedback/comments/suggestions through the NITRC CONN forum (https://www.nitrc.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1144) and thank you all for your continuing support!
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