The XNAT imaging informatics platform: Recent advances

Neuroimaging is an important component of the biomedical research enterprise. As emphasis on translational science has increased, imaging based research has become more tightly coupled with clinical workflows. Similarly, the necessity of recruiting research subjects from geographically dispersed patient populations, along with the need for larger subject cohorts to identify genetic linkages, has led to multi-site image acquisition and an overall increase in the scale of studies. Informatics tools have the potential to provide critical support infrastructure to enable this type of research. We will demonstrate the XNAT imaging informatics platform, with a particular focus on recent features to support clinical research, institutional research imaging repositories, and multi-center studies. XNAT includes a complete DICOM workflow, supports all imaging modalities, is easily extensible to additional data types including derived images and non-imaging information, and includes a secure web services interface for programmatic access to hosted data. XNAT is open source software and freely available to the research community.