BACKGROUND: Global scale brain research collaborations such as the ENIGMA 
(Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) consortium are 
beginning to collect data in large quantity and to conduct meta-analyses using 
uniformed protocols. It becomes strategically important that the results can be 
communicated among brain scientists effectively. Traditional graphs and charts 
failed to convey the complex shapes of brain structures which are essential to 
the understanding of the result statistics from the analyses. These problems 
could be addressed using interactive visualization strategies that can link 
those statistics with brain structures in order to provide a better interface to 
understand brain research results.
RESULTS: We present ENIGMA-Viewer, an interactive web-based visualization tool 
for brain scientists to compare statistics such as effect sizes from 
meta-analysis results on standardized ROIs (regions-of-interest) across multiple 
studies. The tool incorporates visualization design principles such as 
focus+context and visual data fusion to enable users to better understand the 
statistics on brain structures. To demonstrate the usability of the tool, three 
examples using recent research data are discussed via case studies.
CONCLUSIONS: ENIGMA-Viewer supports presentations and communications of brain 
research results through effective visualization designs. By linking 
visualizations of both statistics and structures, users can gain more insights 
into the presented data that are otherwise difficult to obtain. ENIGMA-Viewer is 
an open-source tool, the source code and sample data are publicly accessible 
through the NITRC website ( http://www.nitrc.org/projects/enigmaviewer_20 ). The 
tool can also be directly accessed online ( http://enigma-viewer.org ).