From: anne001 <anne@...>
Date: 2006-02-02T06:53:03+09:00
Subject: Re: neuroimage software - scientific computing and visualization

I think you should stick with Matlab, they have developped programs for
years for this kind of work. The programs I have seen for MRI imaging
are in matlab.

In ruby, there are things missing: ex when you do a sort, you don't get
the index of a sort as in matlab, only the sorted array. So you would
have to write you own - Matlab like - methods.

The other thing I miss in ruby, the ability to do matrix operations. If
you do the mean, it is the mean of a vector, while in matlab, you can
do a mean on any dimension array, indicating which dimension

I don't know how much stats ruby can do, certainly the matlab stat
package is not complete, but I can't imagine that a programming
language would be that developed in this area.

Another reason to stay with matlab is readability. Matlab is a higher
level language. It sounds like you are a programmer selling a product,
so it might be different, but I work at a university, and students
inherit the matlab programs from one another, and then typically they
have to figure out what the program does to get the data in correctly
for their data, get the figures they want for their conditions... the
fact that it is written in a higher level language seems to help.

Ruby does have some matrix computation ability, so you should look at
that, and see if that suits your needs.