Controlling Variability in~Neuroimaging Analysis Pipelines with~Software Product Lines

Gauthier Le Bartz Lyan, Paul Temple, Boris Clenet, Mathieu Acher

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an acquisition technique used for medical diagnosis. It is notably used for structural and functional MRI (or fMRI) image analysis. MRI data is known to be complex and noisy, so pipelines are created to extract and enhance relevant information in retrieved images. The NARPS study highlighted the significant variability that can emerge from different pipelines set up by independent teams while trying to answer the same research question about brain functioning. Having different implementations realizing the same task is a typical playground for software product lines (SPLs), which may be out of the sight of neuroimage practitioners. Thus, proposing an SPL out of these different pipelines falls back on a typical reverse-engineering problem with its usual difficulties. In this document, we advocate for the conceptual adoption of SPL principles as a promising direction to improve reproducibility and consistency in neuroimaging research.