Case Study: Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center achieves faster, more secure data sharing and collaboration with Flywheel

USC’s Dornsife Neuroimaging Center Uses Flywheel to Improve Data Sharing and Collaboration

The Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center (DNI) at USC supports neuroimaging research across the university but struggled with slow, manual data distribution—often delivering scans on DVDs or pushing to individual DICOM servers—which caused delays and quality concerns. Seeking a more efficient, secure way to curate and share data, DNI leadership and Dr. Jonas Kaplan adopted Flywheel’s research data platform.

Flywheel was installed to ingest data from disparate sources, automate DICOM-to-NIfTI conversion and processing, enforce quality checks, and provide secure, remote access and provenance tracking. As a result, manual DVD transfers were eliminated, researchers maintained uninterrupted access to prior scans during the 2020 research pause, cloud-scale Gears accelerated processing and reproducibility, and overall research productivity and secure collaboration across USC improved.

Dana and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center

Jonas Kaplan

Co-Director