mapping approaches in general. These developments also allowed any group to compare and contrast their findings with ongoing findings from other groups around the world—a movement that was stimulated by the development of the Talairach and Tournoux brain atlases, which defined anatomical regions in stereotaxic space (Talairach et al. 1993). The Talairach atlas was among the first to compile a coordinate-based reference system, and it allowed researchers worldwide to relate their findings to existing data collections. In the mid-1990s, a group in San Antonio developed the “Talairach Daemon”, allowing electronic pooling of findings from brain mapping studies based on their coordinates in Talairach space. In addition to the use of standard anatomical templates for reporting results, this coordinate system opened the door for clinically-oriented consortia to scan and analyze large-scale patient populations in a consistent way. The rapid development of nonlinear registration methods also made it possible to improve the alignment of new datasets to digital anatomical templates, for coordinate based reporting of results.
