The CURRY NeuroImaging platform and MEG have a history stretching back over 25 years. CURRY was first conceived as a product in the early 1990’s when Philips Electronics investigated the feasibility of developing it’s own MEG hardware platform. Ultimately, the hardware platform did not survive, but the software, along with its core engineering architects, Dr. Manfred Fuchs & Dr. Michael Wagner, continued on. When Philips exited the MEG business, CURRY and the development team were purchased by Neuroscan. At this time, the UNIX-based CURRY platform appealed more to the research community than to the clinical market. By 1999, publications were emerging describing the application of CURRY for cortical localization of EEG and MEG activity for tactile and auditory sensory input. However, “novel developments” and “new approaches to detailed localization of specific epileptic discharges” as well as identification of functionally critical areas of the brain controlling language and memory using CURRY, were also being reported in the clinical literature. Migration of CURRY from the UNIX to Windows platform in 2003 resulted in a rapid expansion of the use of CURRY in both the research and clinical worlds.
The benefits associated with CURRY’s ability to integrate MEG with EEG and co-register both kinds of high temporal resolution functional imaging data with the structural neuroimaging data including MRI, CT, DTI, as well as PET, SPECT and fMRI accelerated the adoption of the software by both the research and clinical communities. Early clinical adopters, such as Dr. John Ebersole, supported and championed the benefits of source localization tools such as CURRY, contributing to the development of specific source analysis billing codes for EEG and MEG. For a long time, CURRY has been the de-facto software platform for clinical MEG community, particularly for those assessing epilepsy. This has culminated in the adoption of CURRY as the standard analysis platform by the European E-pilepsy Consortium.
For the CURRY team, integrating CURRY with the KRISS MEG hardware represents a full circle of development. With long-term future development plans for both hardware and software, CURRY MEG will offer an expanding list of benefits based on the first fully integrated platform combining EEG, MEG, multi-modal neuroimage co-registration and source reconstruction from a single provider – Compumedics Neuroscan.