FlywheelTools: Data Curation and Manipulation on the Flywheel Platform

The recent and growing focus on reproducibility in neuroimaging studies has led many major academic centers to use cloud-based imaging databases for storing, analyzing, and sharing complex imaging data. Flywheel is one such database platform that offers easily accessible, large-scale data management, along with a framework for reproducible analyses through containerized pipelines. The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is the de facto standard for neuroimaging data, but curating neuroimaging data into BIDS can be a challenging and time-consuming task. In particular, standard solutions for BIDS curation are limited on Flywheel. To address these challenges, we developed FlywheelTools, a software toolbox for reproducible data curation and manipulation on Flywheel. FlywheelTools includes two elements: fw-heudiconv, for heuristic-driven curation of data into BIDS, and flaudit, which audits and inventories projects on Flywheel. Together, these tools accelerate reproducible neuroscience research on the widely used Flywheel platform.

Automated summary

The recent focus on reproducibility in neuroimaging studies has led academic centers to use cloud-based imaging databases like Flywheel. To address the challenges of curating BIDS data on Flywheel, FlywheelTools software toolbox was developed to accelerate reproducible neuroscience research on the platform.