Case Study: CMU-Pitt BRIDGE Center (Carnegie Mellon University) achieves BIDS standardization and automated MRI data workflows with Flywheel

CMU-Pitt BRIDGE Center Standardizes on BIDS with Flywheel’s Research Platform

CMU’s BRIDGE Center (the CMU-Pitt BRIDGE Center) faced rapidly growing MRI data volumes and no easy, standardized way for researchers to access, process, and share imaging data. To adopt the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) standard without building an in-house system, CMU selected Flywheel’s research data and computational management platform (cloud instance with containerized Gears) to support BIDS standardization and scalable data administration.

Flywheel automated secure, encrypted transfer of scanner data into a BRIDGE-controlled cloud instance, applied the Center’s naming conventions to auto-curate files to BIDS, and automatically scheduled quality-control and preprocessing pipelines (e.g., MRIQC, fMRIPrep) via Gears. As a result, Flywheel helped CMU standardize workflows, reduce manual curation and early-stage processing errors, ensure consistent data quality across protocols, and simplify sharing and collaborative analysis, enabling the BRIDGE Center to become one of the first BIDS-compliant MRI research centers.

CMU

John Pyles

Scientific Operations Director