In today’s post, I will cover transferring data from XNAT (storage server for MRI data) and converting it to BIDS format. This is an important precursor step to running fMRIPrep. Unfortunately, the steps I’ll walk through are specific to the Brown community
Before I get too deep into the weeds, I want to give a HUGE shoutout to the Behavioral Neuroimaging Core (BNC), who have provided the bulwark of these tools to the neuroimaging community. I wouldn’t have been able to implement half these tools without their support and heroic efforts to set up this infrastructure. Also, FYI for those following at home outside of the Brown community, all of these tools are available on Github and can be implemented using your own system.
Github Repo for XNAT Tools: https://github.com/brown-bnc/xnat-tools
Brown-Specific XNAT Portal: https://bnc.brown.edu/xnat/
Okay, so let’s get started.
First, our group has set up an XNAT, and neuroinformatics platform to store MRI data developed at Washington University in St. Louis. If you’ve worked with any of the Human Connectome Project Datasets or larger neuroimaging datasets generally, you may have used this interface before (e.g., IntraDB, CNDA, etc). It’s a great interface that allows the user to click buttons to look at what data they’ve stored after each scan. As someone who has spent a lot of time with this interface, I highly recommend it and think it’s super easy to use.
Once you’ve set up your project and your data are all stored, you should be all set to run the ‘xnat2bids’ function from the xnat tools singularity container. The way it was set up for us, we need to extract the subject number and the accession number. (See image below).
As a side note, there may be MRI sessions in which you have extra runs you don’t want to use, and there are numerous ways you can deal with that. I tend to prefer to not delete raw data and just remove data at a post-processing step. So for our study, we’re just specifying which blocks to use and not use (relevant for scripts later).
Finally, you want to set up your scripts. Here, I’ve created two loops – one that is more general and calls ‘xnat2bids’ for the “perfect” runs (i.e., the number of BOLD runs collected is as expected), and the “imperfect” runs (i.e. the number of BOLD runs collected is more than expected). For the imperfect/irregular runs, I’ve used the “skiplist” argument to skip the scan numbers that we do not want to use (see image above).
To run the script, you’ll want to navigate to the folder where the script is, and then rn it using sbatch (if you’re on a supercomputer) or bash (if you’re running locally or don’t have access to cluster). If the latter, make sure you set your computer to rocket launch for a period of time.
*NOTE*: By default, this script will prompt you to login your password for every subject. you can circumvent this by setting your XNAT_USER and XNAT_PASSWORD in your .bashrc file. Some more detailed instructions are here. Here’s a bit of code below.
# Navigate to home directory cd # Edit the .bashrc file gedit .bashrc # Run the bashrc file to implemenet changes in current Termminal window . ~/.bashrc
Here is what my .bashrc file looks like (without my password):
When your scripts are done, you should have your BIDS formatted data. You can check that your data are formatted corrected. In my dataset, I have T1mprage anatomical images (in anat folder), 8 functional task runs (in func folder), fieldmap images (in fmap folder).
A quick note on file naming conventions
What if my DICOM files are named differently across runs or from what I want to name them in after conversion?
Here, we’ve created a bidsmaps file to edit the filenames so they are all the same. If the naming convention is correct/consistent across all studies, you won’t need this file.
Well, that’s it for now. Please feel free to let me know if there’s anything else that should be added in terms of BIDS naming convention.
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