PRoNTo History


  • The first version of the “Pattern Recognition for Neuroimaging Toolbox”, aka. PRoNTo, was developed in 2011 by an international team of researchers (the PRoNTo development team) led by Prof. Janaina Mourao-Miranda and supported by the European Union through the PASCAL Harvest programme (PASCAL2). The original development team included Janaina Mourao-Miranda, Christophe Phillips, Jessica Schrouff, John Ashburner, Maria Joao Rosa, Jonas Richiardi, Andre Marquand, Jane Rondina and Carlton Chu.
  • The motivation to develop PRoNTo stemmed from the unmet need of a flexible pattern recognition analysis framework that would accommodate different types of neuroimaging data, could address various research questions, and be safely used by neuroimagers who are non-expert in machine learning. As the team included SPM developers (John Ashburner and Christophe Phillips) PRoNTo took advantage of many of the SPM existing functions, such as those for file handling and image display, as well as the batch system (Glauch V.).
  • Over the years, new contributors have joined the development group (Joao Matos Monteiro, Anil Rao, Tong Wu and Konstantinos Tsirlis) and PRoNTo was further extended to include new functionalities, such as flexible cross-validation frameworks, option to remove effect of confounds, and atlas based multiple kernel learning (PRoNTo versions 1.1, 2.0, 2.1). In particular, Jessica Schrouff was a major contributor of PRoNTo from its inception till version 3.0. PRoNTo latest version (PRoNTo v3.0) now accepts multiple data formats and enables the building of multimodal predictive models. The latest versions of PRoNTo have been supported by the Wellcome Trust.
  • Currently, the PRoNTo project is led by Prof. Janaina Mourao-Miranda and co-supervised by Prof. Christophe Phillips. Konstantinos Tsrilis supports the PRoNTo developments and is in charge of its management and maintenance. Contributions (e.g. new features, debugging, manual, demonstration data) are mostly provided by Prof. Janaina Mourao-Miranda's group and collaborators but external contributions are welcome.

    team

  • PRoNTo development team in 2011. From left to right: Andre Marquand, Jonas Richiardi, Maria Joao Rosa, Janaina Mourao-Miranda, Christophe Phillips and Jessica Schrouff.

    team

  • PRoNTo development team in 2011. From left to right: Jessica Schrouff, Christophe Phillips, Jonas Richiardi, Maria Joao Rosa and John Ashburner.

    team

  • PRoNTo development team in 2011. From left to right: Carlton Chu and Andre Marquand.