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Creating a new XNAT project§

Contact the MIRSG team to create a new XNAT project on one of the UCL XNAT servers.

  • You will normally be asked to complete a project request form to help the team understand your requirements
  • If your data are contained in a PACS or similar system outside of UCL, you will need to arrange with your data provider to obtain the data files from the system. We recommend starting this process as soon as possible, as experience has shown that obtaining information governance approvals can take a significant length of time in many organisation.
  • If your data contain personal identifiable information, you will need to develop an anonymisation process. The XNAT tools can help with some types of anonymisation.
  • Any anonymisation process needs to be reviewed and tested by a suitable expert.
  • You will likely need to allocate some developer resource time for your project to organise, anonymise and upload your data, and to develop any data processing pipelines you want to perform. This is best done from within your team, but you may be able to request developer time from MIRSG.

Managing a multi-centre study§

If you have data coming from multiple sites, a common approach is to manage the data from each site in a separate XNAT project. You can then use XNAT data sharing to share data into a combined "umbrella" project. This approach is also useful if you need to give different sets of users access to different sets of data.

Contact the MISRG team to discuss managing a multi-centre study with multiple XNAT projects.

Your responsibilities as a project manager§

  1. Anonymisation

  2. Ensure no personal identifiable information is uploaded to or stored in your project

  3. Ensure any anonymisation processes you use have been reviewed and tested by an expert

  4. Appropriate user access

  5. Ensure users can only access the data you are permitted to share with them

  6. Ensure user access is removed as appropriate, e.g. when users leave UCL or when a collaboration ends

  7. Rights to store data

  8. Ensure that you have appropriate permissions to store and use any data in your projects

  9. Delegation

  10. If you give any other users project management access, you must ensure they are aware of and follow these responsibilities