History

The SPM suite and associated theory was originally developed by Karl Friston for the routine statistical analysis of functional neuroimaging data from Positron Emission Tomography (PET), while at the Medical Research Council Cyclotron Unit. Now known as SPMclassic, this software was made available to the emerging functional imaging community in 1991, to promote collaboration and a common analysis scheme across laboratories.

SPM94 was the first major revision of the SPM software. SPM‘94 was written primarily by Karl Friston during the summer of 1994, with invaluable conceptual and technical help from John Ashburner, Jon Heather, Andrew Holmes and Jean-Baptiste Poline. SPM95, SPM96, SPM99, SPM2, SPM5, SPM8 and SPM12 are based on SPM94, and represent the ongoing theoretical advances and technical improvements.

Further reading

Ashburner, J. (2012). SPM: A history.

Flandin, G. & Friston, K.J. Statistical parametric mapping (SPM).

Friston, K.J. A short history of statistical parametric mapping in functional neuroimaging.

Penny, W., Friston, K.J., Ashburner, J., Kiebel, S., & Nichols, T.E. (2006). Statistical parametric mapping: The analysis of functional brain images.

Zeidman, P., Ashburner, J., Barnes, G., Kowalczyk, O.S., Lambert, C., Litvak, V., Nichols, T.E., Parr, T., Tierney, T.M., & Friston, K. (2025). SPM—30 years and beyond. Cerebral Cortex, 35(8).