Neuroimaging Data Primer: A Resource for Curating Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative (NIfTI) Files

Abstract

Background: Academic libraries play a foundational role in supporting and developing open research practices by providing curatorial support and hosting for research data sets, including those from biomedical research. The Data Curation Network is a network of data curators designed to provide a wider variety of curation services than offered at a single institution. Our team formed during a November 2019 workshop offered by the Data Curation Network, and for our final project we decided to create a primer that will help data specialists curate neuroimaging files. Description: Following internal discussions and scoping, our team conducted interviews with researchers who work directly with medical imaging to better identify workflows, common file formats, and core concepts to include in the primer. Based on those findings, we decided to focus our primer on fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data that has been saved in DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) and NIfTI (Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative) formats. Team members supplemented researcher feedback with literature reviews and online resources to establish the primer’s informational foundation. The primer provides a succinct but thorough introduction to the two file formats, giving a data specialist enough information to successfully ready a set of files for deposit into a data archive. Topics covered include file structure and common extensions, the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), and patient privacy and confidentiality concerns. Conclusion: The primer underwent peer review in early Spring 2020 by other cohorts from DCN workshops, and feedback was incorporated by the project team. The open access primer will be deposited into an institutional repository and made openly available for anyone to download and refer to when curating neuroimaging data. All DCN primers are designed to be living documents that can be updated and tweaked by other data curators. To support future collaborative editing and maintain versioning control, the primer is shared on DCN’s GitHub alongside other data curation primers, where it can be updated as needed.

Neuroimaging DICOM & NIfTI Primer on GitHub: https://github.com/DataCurationNetwork/data-primers/blob/master/Neuroimaging%20DICOM%20and%20NIfTI%20Data%20Curation%20Primer/neuroimaging-dicom-and-nifti-data-curation-primer.md