Mbirn: Workflow: Background & Goals
As mBIRN image acquisition, analysis and interrogation resources have matured the need to tie them together has evolved as an mBIRN-wide focus. The use of a well functioning image analysis pipeline will facilitate not only the initial calculation of the experimental results, but also the recalculation for verification of the results, and the exploration of the results.
Analysis pipelines require unifying image data processing standards, file formats and provenance at mBIRN sites to become single, harmonized mBIRN solution. The benefits of a single mBIRN analysis pipeline solution are that it will allow i) collaborations between sites to be set up faster, ii) greater exploration of recalculated experiments and iii) the ability to routinely explore complex parameter spaces. Initial requirements for an mBIRN pipeline solution will be to build a completely open source solution based upon existing workflow expression standards with an architecture that can support current mBIRN use-cases (SASHA, MIRIAD, and Multi-site AD application tests). Analysis pipelines have been developed at several mBIRN sites, however there has not been an mBIRN-wide open source solution. We are currently working to define an open source language specification that supports our long-term goal of a unified mBIRN pipeline but also that conveniently maps to the existing pipelines developed over the years at the mBIRN sites.
