Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that development of the next release of SPM is
reaching its final stages.

We shall be releasing a public beta of SPM99 shortly after the SPM
short course, on Monday 17th May.

Due to the short time-scale, we will not be issuing a developers alpha
release as initially intimated. Thanks to those who expressed an
interest.

Thanks for your patience in waiting for this release. Some of the new
features are outlined below, to whet your appetite!

Further details will be posted to the list and will appear on the SPM99
page of the SPMweb site:
	http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/spm99.html

Best wishes,

-andrew


* Spatial
  - support for re-orienting images via their ".mat" files
  - Realign
	- handles multiple fMRI sessions
	- two pass procedure for PET realignment (images registered to mean)
	- checks for stopping criterion
	- Fourier interpolation (for data with isotropic voxels)
	- algorithm generally improved
	- saves realignment parameters for use as confounds to stats
  - Segment
	- simultaneous nonuniformity correction
	- fixed problem with prior probability images
  - Coregister
	- "tweaked" for slightly better results
	- extended for other modalities
  - Normalize
	- affine part made more stable by using a MAP scheme
	- improved regularization for nonlinear part
	- optional weighting so that out of brain structures don't contribute
	- new templates

* Volume I/O
  - copes with byte-swapped Analyze format data
  - re-working of memory mapping to overcome 2 or 4 Gbyte datasize limit
  - modular image mapping code - support for reading CTI & MINC data

* Completely re-structured & re-written statistics
  - split into three stages: setup, estimation, and assessment (results)
  - estimation stage can be run in batch mode
  - enhanced event related fMRI modelling
  - enhanced filtering for fMRI time series
  - new "basic stats designs" - t-tests, regression &c
  - enhanced PET models
  - supports masked data, explicit masks, and negative data
  - writes parameter estimates, variance estimates, contrasts and SPM's
    as image files
  - integrated random effects via multi-level analyses
  - contrasts entered after estimation (in the results section)
  - new "contrast manager"
  - "F-contrasts" to specify F-tests (& hence two-sided T-tests)
  - Inference directly on t & F fields (i.e. no "Gaussianisation")
  - small volume corrections (Keith Worsleys' unified theory)
  - new conjunctions formulation (as minimum field) - with K Worsley
  - no "F-thresholding" of results saved for analysis
  - vastly improved results interrogation section

* New utilities
  - enhanced image algebra (ImCalc)
  - improved display facility - *.mat file sensitive
   (Multiplanar toolbox in preparation)
  - CheckReg - clickable ortho projections of two images side by side
  - improved rendering facility
  - brain extraction routine

* Enhanced GUI & command line use
  - range checking of input
  - context menus (right mouse button)
  - command line input has access to base workspace
  - context help and ToolTips

* Re-written for Matlab version 5 (5.2 or greater required)
  - no additional toolboxes required

* Cross platform support
  - Solaris, Linux & WindowsNT supported "out of the box"
    - *.mexsol, *.mexlx & *.dll's provided
  - makefile supports many other UNIX platforms

+- SPM manager ------------------------------- [log in to unmask] -+
| -___  ____  __  __ The Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology - |
| / __)(  _ \(  \/  )  Statistical Parametric Mapping                 |
| \__ \ )___/ )    (   Functional Neuroimaging Software               |
| (___/(__)  (_/\/\_)                                                 |
+---------------------------------- http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm -+


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