Last Friday (2017/01/13) the Center for Reproducible Neuroscience organized an event at Stanford University to present two new MRI software tools built by the CRN: MRIQC – for quality control – and FMRIPREP – for robust preprocessing. The two tools have been under heavy development for that past year and the purpose of the event was to introduce the two tools to the local community and gather feedback about existing as well as upcoming features.
The event was attended by over 50 scientists representing over 15 local neuroimaging labs. Two presentations by Oscar Esteban (slides) and Chris Gorgolewski (slides) were followed by a general Q&A session and series of breakout sessions focused on specific questions (surface analysis, temporal denoising, clinical populations etc.).

Even though MRIQC and FMRIPREP are open source tools available freely to everyone, working closely with the local scientific community will help us debug existing functionality, triage new features and accelerate development in this early stage. After incorporating the feedback we received during this event we are planning to host a similar one in the near future – this time targeted at the worldwide audience and performed in a form of a webinar.
You can read more about MRIQC here and FMRIPREP here. If you have ideas or suggestions concerning MRIQC or FMRIPREP please post them on neurostars.org.