Acknowledgements for the Priorset Application

This is a short, and likely incomplete, list of contributions and inspirations that helped in the development of a solid Priorset application. Along the way, we've given a nod towards a bit of history.

  • First and foremost a huge thank you to the original developers for the Vespa package, Philip Semanchuk, David Todd, Karl Young (and I guess me, Brian Soher) for the hard work and dedication to see this thing fly.

  • Also a solid nod towards the National Institutes of Health for funding this through grant number 1R01EB008387-01A1.

  • A big shout out to Jeff Steinberg who translated a bunch of the initial scientific modules from the original Klingon, I mean IDL.

Now for a little history and thank-yous! The original program that inspired this work was:

  • From SITools to IDL-Vespa - From 1996 until 2004, Brian Soher, Karl Young, Varanavasi Govindaraju, John Kornak and Denis Khetselius, with funding and inspiration from Andrew Maudsley at UC San Francico, wrote a number of papers and a whole bunch of IDL code to process and and analyze MRS data. The original SITools was a toolbox/pipeline approach, better suited to processing large spectroscopic imaging data sets. It also contained at least a prototype utility for what eventually became the Priorset application, at least in that we could create simulated data sets for testing the SITool code.

This software eventually morphed (due to NIH funding) into the MIDAS package for multi-modal EPSI data processing and analysis. To simplify benchtopping new algorithms, a small application called IDL-Vespa was writeen for processing single voxel data. This new application benefited greatly from the knowledge and wisdom amassed through years of code creep in SITools. IDL-Vespa was quite modular, but contained all within one application. It processed MRS data from raw k-space to fitted metabolite using techniques described in many of Dr. Soher's papers. Soher aquired funding for maintaining and extending IDL-Vespa into the Vespa-Analysis application in 2008.