Rxnat: An Open-Source R Package for XNAT-Based Repositories

Rxnat: An Open-Source R Package for XNAT-Based Repositories

Blog Article

The extensible neuroimaging archive toolkit (XNAT) Cyanocrylate Adhesive is a common platform for storing and distributing neuroimaging data and is used by many key repositories of public neuroimaging data.Some examples include the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC, https://nitrc.org/), the ConnectomeDB for the Human Connectome Project (https://db.humanconnectome.

org/), and XNAT Central (https://central.xnat.org/).We introduce Rxnat (https://github.

com/adigherman/Rxnat), an open-source R package designed to interact with any XNAT-based repository.The program has similar capabilities with PyXNAT and XNATpy, which were developed for Python users.Rxnat was developed to address the increased popularity of R among neuroimaging researchers.The Rxnat package can query multiple XNAT repositories and download all or a specific subset of images for further processing.

This provides a lingua franca for the large community of R analysts to interface with multiple XNAT-based publicly available neuroimaging repositories.The potential of Rxnat is illustrated using an example of neuroimaging data normalization from Stationery two neuroimaging repositories, NITRC and HCP.