BALSA houses extensively analyzed neuroimaging and neuroanatomical datasets mapped to brain atlas surfaces and volumes. BALSA is designed to share BALSA Studies or BALSA Reference datasets, which in addition to data files, contain "scenes" that can be displayed in the Connectome Workbench brain visualization platform. Each BALSA study or Reference dataset can contain several scene files, which in turn can contain several scenes.
A few definitions of terms related to BALSA:
A BALSA Study is a neuroimaging dataset associated with a published scientific study voluntarily submitted by authors to BALSA for sharing with the community.
A BALSA Reference dataset is a curated neuroimaging dataset accurately mapped to brain atlas surfaces and volumes that is meant to serve as a common standard for comparison or use with ongoing studies or other neuroimaging datasets.
A Workbench scene is a saved configuration of settings and filenames (with directory structures)) displayed in the wb_view visualization platform. These settings, which include orientation, zooming, palettes, displayed layers, etc., can be saved globally in a scene file. Multiple scenes can be saved within one scene file.
A Workbench scene file organizes one or more scenes to be saved for future use. This allows the user to reopen a Workbench session, including data and settings, (i.e. a scene) at a later time allowing the user to "pick up where they left off."
Connectome Workbench (aka Workbench) is a software tool for visualizing and performing analyses on brain surface and volume data from multiple species and in several file formats including GIFTI, NIFTI, and CIFTI. Workbench includes wb_view, a graphical user interface for visualizing neuroanatomical data and wb_command, software tools for performing various operations on brain surface and volume files at the command line. Learn more (or download it) here.
Questions and comments? If you have questions, comments, or suggestions about BALSA, please use the HCP Listserv (HCP-Users@humanconnectome.org; to subscribe, click here), as your inputs may be of interest to other BALSA users and HCP users more broadly.