Introduction

The BNC has collected a demo dataset that is available to the community to aid in learning how to use our tools and processing scripts. While this dataset contains typical sequences, it is not exhaustive and the best sequences for your study may differ. Our hope is that this data set will be useful for understanding how protocols appear on the scanner console, for understanding how data appears when it is transferred to XNAT, and for learning how to access and export data from XNAT in a variety of formats, including BIDS.

Throughout this user manual, we will refer back to this dataset as the example for different analysis pipelines. We recommend that you download the data and follow along interactively as you learn about various MRI-related packages (AFNI, Freesurfer, Osprey, etc).

Note: If you've used the BNC's demo dataset in the past, you may notice that things look different now. Starting in 2025 we began collecting a second demo dataset (called Demodat2), which includes updated protocol parameters and additional sequences. It also includes physiological data which was acquired during scanning. Demodat2 was collected on our Siemens scanner after upgrading it to XA30, which means the dicom files are now in the newer "enhanced dicom" format.

Demodat (version 1) is still available to download on XNAT, but the tutorials in this user manual are now updated to reference Demodat2.