The Human Brain Project consortium continues to struggle with effective sharing of tools. To facilitate reuse of its tools, the Stanford Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory (SPNL) has developed BrainImageJ, a new software framework in Java. The framework consists of two components-a set of four programming interfaces and an application front end. The four interfaces define extension pathways for new data models, file loaders and savers, algorithms, and visualization tools. Any Java class that implements one of these interfaces qualifies as a BrainImageJ plug-in-a self-contained tool. After automatically detecting and incorporating new plug-ins, the application front end transparently generates graphical user interfaces that provide access to plug-in functionality. New plug-ins interoperate with existing ones immediately through the front end. BrainImageJ is used at the Stanford Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory to develop image-analysis algorithms and three-dimensional visualization tools. It is the goal of our development group that, once the framework is placed in the public domain, it will serve as an interlaboratory platform for designing, distributing, and using interoperable tools.

Special-purpose architectures have been proposed to provide high processing rates for signal processing applications. These architectures use highly concurrent structures on VLSI circuits to achieve billions of multiply/add operations per second. Both serial-parallel and fully bit-serial multiplier elements have been proposed for highly concurrent signal processing arrays. Error detection can be accomplished by applying arithmetic codes to the multiplier hardware in different ways. Here, low-cost residue codes are applied to three different error detection architectures for both serial-parallel and fully bit-serial processing elements. The error performance of these different implementations is studied through computer simulation. The cost of using these codes in terms of silicon area and circuit complexity is also investigated.>