XNAT + Neurodesk + JupyterHub: A Powerful Platform for Neuroimaging Analysis

An open, robust and efficient platform plays a critical role in Neuroimaging data management, analysis, and collaboration. The Australian Imaging Service (AIS), as a national platform for secure imaging management, analysis, informatics and machine learning, aims to bring and integrate various Neuroimaging platforms together to advance Neuroimaging research. JupyterHub serves as a collaborative platform for hosting Jupyter Notebooks, empowering interactive data exploration, visualisation, and analysis among multiple users in distributed environments. Neurodesk is an open-source software platform designed to facilitate the deployment and execution of Neuroimaging and neuroscience analysis tools in a containerised and reproducible environment. XNAT is an open-source Neuroimaging data management platform that serves as a central repository for storing and managing Neuroimaging data. By integrating XNAT, JupyterHub and Neurodesk platform, we have extended the AIS ecosystem to provide researchers with a browser-accessible virtual desktop environment for working on data securely stored in XNAT central repository. This integrated platform ensures efficient data pipelines, fostering consistent data analysis and workflow across a variety of users and environments.