I am the IT manager for the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging which is a joint research center of Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Harvard HST and MIT BCS. We have over 300+ Linux workstations at users desks for our imaging analysis. Up until around 2008 users would use VNC for remote graphical access, then we started using FreeNX and more recently X2Go. The primary analysis tools are MATLAB and FreeSurfer (http://freesurfer.net). -Paul Raines