Project and Protocol Naming

Naming your XNAT Project and your Protocol Tree

When a session is collected at the scanner, the data will be sent to XNAT and placed in an XNAT Project that is accessible only to the associated researchers.

For XNAT to route data coming from the scanner to the appropriate project, the XNAT Project ID and the Scanner Protocol tree need to be named consistently

XNAT Project Title and ID

When creating new projects, XNAT asks for the following fields

Variable	Description
Project Title	The full title of the project, which will appear in the site-wide project listing.
Running Title	This is an abbreviated project name, which will appear in search listings and data tables.
Project ID	This ID is used within the XNAT database and in all API calls related to your project and its data. Once set, it cannot be changed.

Further details can be found in this section of XNAT's documentation

Choosing your values

The values we choose have implications on the way that protocol trees must be named at the scanner. Particularly, the Project ID entered in XNAT must match the Study Description field in the scanner (shown in the next section). At the scanner, the Study Description is automatically built by concatenating the protocol tree. Traditionally, protocol trees were named to be easily identifiable, and they were often reused across multiple studies. However, new limitations exist which greatly impact the naming scheme:

1. The protocol tree must start with the PI's brown username

2. The concatenated field for Study Description must be at most 27 characters

3. The concatenated field for Study Description must be unique

With those considerations in mind, we make the following recommendations:

Project Title

The Project Title should contain the following fields:

1. PI's Lastname

2. Custom Study Name

The fields should follow that order and be separated by spaces. Below we present examples

| PI  | |Ref #| |Name |
Shenhav TSS-TCB
Shenhav TSS-OA

Running Title and Project ID

Both the Running Title and Project ID must contain the following fields:

1. PI's Brown Credential (short name)

2. Custom Name (within length limit)

and follow these rules

• Use ALL CAPS

• Separate only with underscores

• Maximum of 27 characters

For instance,

ASHENHAV_TCB
ASHENHAV_OA