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

Abstract

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The extensible neuroimaging archive toolkit (XNAT) 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 two neuroimaging repositories, NITRC and HCP.

Keywords

• XNAT
• R
• neuroimaging
• nitrc
• connectome
• MRI