The History of LORIS

LORIS was originally developed for the NIH MRI Study of Normal Brain Development (NIHPD; Evans and Brain Development Cooperative Group, 2006), which was funded in 1999. LORIS was designed from inception to facilitate active multi-site study management and centralized archiving and retrieval of multi-modal data.

The initial instance of LORIS included behavioural data entry functionality, scoring algorithms and normative lookup tables coded directly into the database for the full battery of measures. An imaging browser was added soon after for management and quality control procedures. Querying capabilities were eventually included using our Data Query Tool with the public dissemination phase of the study in 2006.

Having completed the full lifecycle of the NIHPD multi-site study, LORIS was adopted as the data platform for IBIS (Infant Brain Imaging Study), the Autism sibling study of brain development. Eventually, LORIS began to proliferate globally to numerous projects.

Numerous tools and modules have since been incorporated into the platform to facilitate data management, quality control, and sharing efforts. Web-based imaging visualization was introduced via BrainBrowser in 2011.

LORIS’ extensive suite of modules is deployed in numerous projects globally with code contributions coming from an ever-growing community of developers.