XNAT is an open-source imaging informatics platform developed by the Neuroinformatic Research Group (NRG) at Washington University. It facilitates common management, productivity, and quality assurance tasks for imaging and associated data. Since the base application has been developed focusing on both the clinical and pre-clinical studies, there is a
need to customise the application to meet the needs of pre-clinical studies.
The aim of this project is to implement a federated XNAT portal and to create a customised XNAT web application that can store more metadata information about the projects and make the search for the projects more efficient.
For the federated XNAT, we used and adapted the Xsync plugin. The current development includes communication between XNAT instances and syncing the projects from any instance to the centralized XNAT instance. Once we combine and use the two plugins that we developed, it will be possible to sync the information from the local instances (source) to the Destination (Central XNAT) and also to obtain precise information about each project that is being synced.
A metadata plugin has been developed for XNAT instances which modify the UI part of i) the “new project page” to insert metadata information and ii) the “home page” with an additional query box to search for image datasets based on a metadata filter.