Longitduinal study data handling with XNAT desktop client and meta data transfer

[Nawazish Khan]

Hi,
We are planning to use the XNAT desktop client for our project to acquire brain imaging scans from the consortium members. We have few questions concerning this that I hope you can help us with. I could not find any relevant or direct information from the documentation about these topics.

1. How does XNAT handle the subject IDs for a longitudinal study. We might be uploading a scan for a patient in one session and at a different time point another scan. How can we ensure that the scans for the same subjects but at different time point are together but could be distinguished with each other?

2. How to upload metadata asscoiated with each scan while uploading through XNAT desktop client? We have patient specific metadata like severity scores, coginitive assessment, surgeon ratings, etc. that we want to package and upload together in a bulk upload fashion. Does XNAT desktop client provides any methods to streamline this process?

Thanks,
Nawazish

[Charlie Moore]

Hi Nawazish,

https://wiki.xnat.org/xnat-tools/subject-and-session-labeling-schemes-for-uploads - The XNAT Desktop Client has several ways you can assign a subject label. If you consistently use the same mechanism, and the value remains consistent over time (for example, using Patient ID, and the Patient ID remaining consist over time), the additional studies should get associated to the same subject in XNAT. Note that the "Auto-Generate Labels" option for subject labels has exactly this scenario as for why that option will not be a good choice for your scenario: when you come back in a month and upload new longitudinal data, it's going to autogenerate a new random ID.

On number 2, the desktop client is not equipped to act as a way to package and upload arbitrary data. That sounds like a very difficult task to solve. XNAT does have APIs for uploading arbitrary resource files where you could store these, or you could create new data types to model the data if you'd like it to be searchable.

Thanks,

Charlie Moore