Neuroimaging is a broad field encompassing static images, such as anatomical MRI as well as dynamic, functional data such as M/EEG or fMRI. The MNE software already relies on some other packages such as FreeSurfer for anatomical MRI processing, or Nibabel for file operations. Our ambition is of course not to make MNE-Python self-contained, dropping any dependency on other software. Indeed the MNE-Python package cannot and does not aim to do everything. MNE has its own scope and seeks to leverage the capabilities of external software in the neuroimaging software ecosystem. Tighter integration with fMRI analysis pipelines could be facilitated by NiPype (Gorgolewski et al., 2011) but is first made possible by adopting standards. That is why all data MNE produces are stored in FIF file format which can be read and written by various software packages written in different languages. The MNE-Python code favors its integration in the scientific Python ecosystem via the use of NumPy and SciPy, and limits effort duplication and code maintainance burden by pushing to more general purpose software packages any improvement to non M/EEG
