CIFTI — Connectivity Informatics Technology Initiative File Format

Overview

CIFTI is a neuroimaging file format for surface and volume combined (greyordinate) data, developed by the Human Connectome Project to overcome the limitations of purely volumetric formats like NIfTI for cortical data. Where NIfTI stores brain data as a 3D voxel volume, CIFTI stores data along axes that combine cortical surface vertices (left and right hemispheres) with subcortical volume voxels, enabling more biologically meaningful spatial representation of cortical activity and connectivity. It is built on the NIfTI-2 container with XML header extensions, and is the standard format for HCP-style analyses. CIFTI-2 (2014) is the current stable version.

Connections

• Built on: NIfTI (NIfTI-2 as container format)
• Compatible with: BIDS (CIFTI derivatives extension proposal BEP003)

Resources

• https://www.nitrc.org/projects/cifti/
• https://github.com/CIFTI/CIFTI-2 (CIFTI-2 specification)