qPRF: A system to accelerate population receptive field decoding.

We describe a novel software system, qPRF, which can perform population receptive field (PRF) decoding of BOLD fMRI at speeds about 1400 times faster than the conventional systems designed for PRF decoding.We show that qPRF yields estimates of PRF model parameters that, in terms of goodness-of-fit, are equivalent to estimates derived using the conventional systems.An efficient similarity-based search strategy, underlies the accelerated computations of qPRF, supported by a specially designed data structure wherein tens of millions of pre-computed prediction curves are stored.