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Sharing data between XNAT projects§

You can share data from one XNAT project into another.

A common approach in a multi-centre study is to create a separate XNAT project to host the data from each site. You can then use XNAT data sharing to share the data into a single "umbrella" project which can be accessed by the research team. If different sets of users need access to different data, you could create multiple umbrella projects.

  • Contact the MISRG team if you would like to set up additional projects to help manage a multi-centre study.

Example setup:

  • Project A: Contains data from Hospital A
  • Project B: Contains data from Hospital B
  • Project C: contains data you have shared from Project A and Project B
  • You give researchers access to project C

When you share data, it does not make a copy. The data remains owned and managed by its original "source" project. Any changes to the data will be reflected across all the shares.

Users cannot modify shared data unless they have permissions to modify the data in the original source project which stores the data.

How to share data in XNAT§

Sharing is done subject-by-subject. You can share all experiments for a subject, or you can choose which experiments to share.

  1. Navigate to the subject you wish to share
  2. Select your project from Browse > My projects in the bar at the top of the screen
  3. Select the subject from the table at the bottom
  4. Alternatively, you can search for the subject from the XNAT home screen.
  5. Under Subject Details, select the Projects Tab sharing
  6. From the Share into drop-down, choose the project you wish to share the subject into. You can only shared data into projects you manage.
  7. Click the Share button
  8. The Sharing Manager will appear. sharing

In most cases you can leave the options as they are.

  • If you want to prevent sharing of particular experiments, uncheck these

  • If you want to assign different subject or experiment labels to the shared the subject or experiments to have different labels in the shared project, you can modify them here.

  • Click the Share button to complete the sharing.

The shared subject data will now be available in the destination project. XNAT highlights shared datasets in project lists.