New diffusion MRI online software may fight medicine's "replication crisis"

Researchers have developed a set of online tools that may help fight the "replication crisis" regarding experiments in medicine, according to a recent University of Washington (UW) news release. Published online March 5 in Nature Communications, the tools are a part of an open-access browser that can display, analyze and share widely available neurological data collected through diffusion-weighted MRI.  

“There has been a lot of talk among researchers about the replication crisis,” said lead author Jason Yeatman, PhD, in a prepared statement. “But we wanted a tool — ready, widely available and easy to use — that would actually help fight the replication crisis.” 

Known as the AFQ (Automated Fiber-tract Quantification) Browser, the portable web browser-based software is a publicly available platform for researchers to upload, visualize, analyze and share diffusion MRI data, according to the news release.  

Researchers are also able to input additional codes to analyze data and visualize differences in white matter amongst studies. Researchers at UW hope the AFQ will to allow for more publicly accessible data and improved transparency and data-sharing for neurological studies.  

“One major barrier to data transparency in neuroscience is that so much data collection, storage and analysis occurs on local computers with special software packages,” said senior author Ariel Rokem, PhD, a senior data scientist in the UW eScience Institute, in a prepared statement. “But using AFQ-Browser, we eliminate those requirements and make uploading, sharing and analyzing diffusion-weighted MRI data a simple, straightforward process.”