Direct recording of neural activity from the human brain (intracranial encephalography, iEEG, also known as electrocorticography, ECoG) using implanted electrodes is one of the fastest-growing techniques in neuroscience. A key obstacle to progress is the vast quantity of data collected with ECOG.

Current analysis and visualization tools are not designed to interact with the large volume of ECOG data in a simple, yet comprehensive way; this bottleneck prevents investigators from producing actionable discoveries.

RAVE overcomes this obstacle by providing a powerful, comprehensive, free, user-friendly toolkit that makes it easy to analyze and view vast quantities of ECOG data. As a software tool designed from the ground-up for analysis and visualization of ECOG data, RAVE is the ideal tool for all current and future ECOG users, increasing productivity and the potential for transformative discoveries by the growing cadre of ECOG investigators.
    
The development of RAVE is driven by three imperatives.  The first is to keep users "close to the data" so that users may make discoveries about the brain without being misled by artifacts. The second imperative is rigorous statistical methodology. RAVE is developed using the powerful statistical language “R” and leverages existing framework of validated R packages. The final imperative is "play well with others". RAVE makes it easy to seamlessly incorporate RAVE into existing analysis streams.