NIAK contributors

People

NIAK is developed by the SIMEXP lab, located at "Unité de Neuroimagerie Fonctionnelle" (UNF), "Centre de Recherche de l'Institut de Gériatrie de Montréal" (CRIUGM), "Département d'Informatique et de Recherche Opérationnelle" (DIRO), Université de Montréal. The following people have directly helped to develop NIAK, either through code or ideas :

• Pierre Bellec
• Pierre-Olivier Quirion
• Christian Dansereau
• Yassine Benhajali
• Sebastian Urchs
• François Chouinard-Decorte
• Felix Carbonell
• Vincent Perlbarg
• Claude Lepage
• Andrew Janke
• Vladimir Fonov
• Jussi Tohka
• Oliver Lytelton

Institutions

The following institutions are involved in the development and diffusion of NIAK :

• Unité de neuroimagerie fonctionnelle, Centre de recherche de l'institut de gériatrie de Montréal (CRIUGM), "Département d'Informatique et de Recherche Opérationnelle" (DIRO), Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada. These instutions support the core of NIAK maintenance and development.
• McConnell Brain Imaging Center (BIC), Montreal Neurological Institute, Mcgill University, Montréal, Canada. Most of the tools provided in NIAK have been developed at this institution over the past 15 years. NIAK was started in Alan Evans' lab during P. Bellec's post-doctoral work.
• Laboratoire d'Imagerie Fonctionnelle (LIF), Inserm, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), Paris, France. This institution has contributed a number of tools to NIAK through the inputs of Vincent Perlbarg.
• Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology. This institution has contributed a number of tools to NIAK through the inputs of Jussi Tohka.
• Australia National University. This institution has contributed a number of tools to NIAK through the inputs of Andrew Janke.
• The Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC) generously provides hosting of the NIAK forum and releases.
• Github generously provides hosting of the NIAK repository and website.

Opensource software

Many of the functions of the kit are based on software developed over the years by members and collaborators of the BIC and most notably fMRIstat developed by the late Keith Worsley and NIAKified by Felix Carbonnell, the MINC tools and the CIVET pipeline. Other codes came from opensource projects (the detailed licenses are in the respective codes):

• The pipeline system is a project called PSOM, developed by Pierre Bellec and colleagues (MIT license).
• The NIFTI reader/writer is adapted from a code by Jimmy Shen (BSD license).
• The conversion between rotation/translation and matrix representations of rigid-body motion by Giampiero Campa (BSD license).
• The 'sinc' scheme for slice timing correction is from SPM (GPL license).
• The NIAK logo was adapted from an original work by the artist Mattahan (creative commons license).
• The spatial independent component analysis was extracted from fMRlab (GPL license).
• The windowed Fourier transfrom is from the WaveLab toolbox (license : non-standard).
• The mutli-dimensional scaling algorithm and implementation was generously contributed by Marc Strickert as part of the NIAK project (MIT license).
• The brain connectivity toolbox (BCT) implements some of the graph measures of the NIAK connectome pipeline, and is bundled as part of the NIAK release.

Finally, a lot of people have been involved in beta-testing the project and gave very precious feedback over the years. A non-exhaustive list includes Benjamin D'hont, Pr Christophe Grova's lab, Pr Jean Gotman's lab, Pr Alain Dhager's lab, Pr Pedro Rosa-Neto's lab and Sébastien Lavoie-Courchesne.