LAYNII: A software suite for layer-fMRI

High-resolution fMRI in the sub-millimeter regime allows researchers to resolve brain activity across cortical layers and columns non-invasively. While these high-resolution data make it possible to address novel questions of directional information flow within and across brain circuits, the corresponding data analyses are challenged by MRI artifacts, including image blur- ring, image distortions, low SNR, and restricted coverage. These challenges often result in insufficient performance accuracy of conventional analysis pipelines. Here we introduce a new software suite that is specifically designed for layer-specific functional MRI: LAYNII. This toolbox is a collection of command- line executable programs written in C/C++ and is distributed open-source and as pre-compiled binaries for Linux, Windows, and macOS. LAYNII is designed for layer-fMRI data that suffer from SNR and coverage constraints and thus cannot be straightforwardly analysed in alternative software packages. Some of the most popular programs of LAYNII contain layerification and columnarization in the native voxel space of functional data as well as many other layer-fMRI specific analysis tasks: layer- specific smoothing, vein-removal of GE-BOLD data, quality assessment of artifact dominated sub-millimeter fMRI, as well as analyses of VASO data