Martin E. Johansson, Nijmegen, Netherlands (ENIGMA-PD)

As an experienced MRI data wrangler, I was immediately intrigued by Nipoppy’s and Neurobagel’s potential to simplify data organization, harmonization, and interaction. At first, I feared that Nipoppy would be incompatible with my pre-existing, painstakingly BIDSified MRI data, forcing me to redo this procedure. However, after initializing a new data set with Nipoppy, I found that I could simply fill this new directory with symbolic links to my BIDSified MRI data. This has allowed me to take full advantage of the other features that Nipoppy offers. In particular, I really appreciate the ability to customize the generation of derivatives using the global configuration file. Next, I transitioned to Neurobagel. I found this latter tool to be very powerful when trying to find out how many scans I have at my disposal, particularly when looking at subsets of the data stratified by diagnosis and other demographic/clinical variables, a task I previously accomplished using exceedingly messy BaSH-coding with lots of IF-statements. While Neurobagel has been very useful, I found it somewhat difficult to set up and maintain the node required for using the query tool. However, after some quick hands-on assistance from members of the Origami team, I am now able to handle this step on my own as well.