PyXNAT: XNAT in Python

TL;DR

PyXNAT is a Python library that provides high-level, cross-platform access to the XNAT neuroimaging database, simplifying data management and integration with scientific Python packages.

Contribution

It introduces PyXNAT, enabling efficient, user-friendly, and high-level interaction with XNAT through Python, surpassing low-level web service interfaces.

Findings

Provides direct access to all XNAT features via Python

Unifies XNAT web services with a high-level language

Facilitates scripting and automation in neuroimaging data management

Abstract

As neuroimaging databases grow in size and complexity, the time researchers spend investigating and managing the data increases to the expense of data analysis. As a result, investigators rely more and more heavily on scripting using high-level languages to automate data management and processing tasks. For this, a structured and programmatic access to the data store is necessary. Web services are a first step toward this goal. They however lack in functionality and ease of use because they provide only low level interfaces to databases. We introduce here PyXNAT, a Python module that interacts with The Extensible Neuroimaging Archive Toolkit (XNAT) through native Python calls across multiple operating systems. The choice of Python enables PyXNAT to expose the XNAT Web Services and unify their features with a higher level and more expressive language. PyXNAT provides XNAT users direct access to all the scientific packages in Python. Finally PyXNAT aims to be efficient and easy to use, both as a backend library to build XNAT clients and as an alternative frontend from the command line.