Automated QA

Two tools are available in the BXH/XCEDE tools package distributed by the BIRN. Both work on a number of image formats including various flavors of DICOM, NIFTI, Analyze, MINC, and others.

You can find the BXH/XCEDE tools on the BIRN website under the tools page (http://www.nbirn.net/tools/browse_tools.shtm). Those must be installed prior to running these QA steps.

The first step before running either of the QA scripts is to extract image metadata into an XCEDE file:

bxhabsorb --xcede myfile1.dcm myfile2.dcm … image.xml '
Then the image.xml file can be used as the input for the QA tool.

Phantom QA

This tool was written to calculate various statistics on functional agar phantom data, and is based on the techniques described in "Report on a Multicenter fMRI Quality Assurance Protocol" by Lee Friedman and Gary H. Glover, JOURNAL OF MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING 23:827?839 (2006).

fmriqa_phantomqa.pl image.xml outputQAdir

Various options are available; run fmriqa_phantomqa.pl without arguments to get a help message.

Human QA

This tool calculates a large number of simple measures on time-series data, and is designed for use on images of human brains. Mean intensity, center-of-mass/motion, running difference, per-slice spikiness, temporal standard deviation, and other measures are included, and written to an HTML report which can be opened in any web browser. All the measures are also written to an XML file for easy importing into other analysis tools.

fmriqa_generate.pl image.xml outputQAdir

Various options are available; run fmriqa_generate.pl without arguments to get a help message.

Contributed by: Syam Gadde (June 2007)