Case Study: UC Irvine achieves secure, scalable multicenter neuroimaging collaboration with Flywheel

Enabling Scientific Collaboration at UCI Yassa Lab

UC Irvine’s Yassa Lab, led by Dr. Michael Yassa, was grappling with growing imaging data volumes, complex analytic pipelines, and the need to support multicenter studies (including Alzheimer’s and Down syndrome biomarker research). After evaluating solutions, the lab adopted the Flywheel research data management platform (deployed on Google Cloud Platform) to secure data, standardize processing, and enable broader collaboration.

Flywheel implemented automated DICOM ingest and conversion, rules-driven QC and preprocessing (e.g., MRIQC, Dcm2Niix), and analytic Gears (fMRIPrep, FreeSurfer), while recording full processing metadata and providing searchable, programmatic access. As a result, UC Irvine streamlined multicenter workflows, made historical datasets reusable, improved reproducibility and data governance, and removed many manual steps that previously took roughly 1–2 hours per participant—significantly increasing lab productivity and enabling secure global collaboration.

UC Irvine

Michael Yassa

Director of the Translational Neurobiology Lab