AMI Centre facilities - IT system

AMI network in a nutshell

AMI Centre has its own internal network separated from the WWW by the Aalto University firewall and AMI Centre's own firewall. The strict firewall policy is needed because of the nature and amount of subject/medical data in our network. All AMI users who need to transfer data, analyse data locally at AMI, are visitors, sit permanently in the premises of AMI Centre (Magnethouse, Otakaari 5 I) or who are otherwise justified to having user rights to the network will be granted these rights. In order to get your user account, please contact AMI Centre personnel.

AMI workstations are connected to AMI internal network and have a direct access to AMIserver. The workstations should be provided/paid by the individual group that you work with, but AMI IT-support personnel will help you in determining the composition of the desktop computer (either Linux or Windows is supported). The data disks on the workstations are not backed-up, so you need to take care of backing-up your data by yourself!

Image transfer and grace period

When you perform MR scanning at the magnet console, your image data will automatically be transferred to AMIserver's /opt/dicom_images/sorted/<Referring_Physician> -folder based on the name you provide to the field "Referring physician" at the magnet console. If you leave the field blank, the data will be transferred to a folder named "Unknown_referring_physician". From there onwards, there are several ways how you can transfer your data to your desired location:

1. You can use secure copy (ssh/scp) in AMI network to copy data to your desired location (outside network). Please note, that you need a AMI user account to connect the network.
2. If you sit permanently at Magnethouse and you have a Linux workstation, we can configure your data to be automatically transferred to your own desktop's /opt/dicom_images/ -folder. 
3. You can save the data directly to CD/DVD at the magnet console.
4. You can save the data directly to external hard drive via AMI Centre's workstation. You will need a AMI user account for this.

In all cases, please note that AMI Centre only guarantees that your data will stay in AMIserver for two weeks! After this grace period, it may be removed without further notice, so move/copy and back-up your data as soon as possible after you have finished scanning to make sure that you will have your data. Also, when performing data transfer, please verify that your data has actually been transferred to your remote location.

Stimulus and other computers

Please note that all stimulus computers are not (actively) backed-up, so you must have your own back-ups for your scripts and stimuli. Also, when measuring EEG, eye-movement etc. you should copy/move your data to your own preferred media as soon as possible, because those computers are used by several different people and the data is not backed-up either. It is possible that someone else might accidentally delete/overwrite your data, a hard-drive failure might occur and etc.

Supported software

Installed software for data analysis and stimulus delivery.

AMI Centre provides installations for data analysis software used by fMRI researchers working in AMI Centre. Due to several researchers performing their data analysis in the same campus, the knowhow on the following software is extensive and they are also available to users working inside AMI Centre's computer network:

• MATLAB (under Aalto University campus license)
• FreeSurfer
• SPM (several versions; 2, 5, and 8)
• FSL
• BrainVoyager
• BrainProducts' Analyzer

For stimulus delivery, the following software are supported by AMI Centre:

• Presentation (newest, and one or two previous releases)
• E-Prime
• PsychoPy
• Psychtoolbox
• Matlab