FMRIPrep: extending the scanner to produce ready-for-analysis fMRI data

Analyses of blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) data -like other functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) modalities- cannot operate directly on the images reconstructed by the scanner. Researchers have typically addressed this problem by inserting a data "preprocessing" step before analysis. fMRIPrep (Esteban et al., 2018) fulfills such a task with an easy-to-use interface that minimizes user intervention by self-adapting to the input data. The ever-increasing number of fMRIPrep users demonstrates the adequacy of the approach to simplify the neuroimaging workflow while maximizing the transparency and reproducibility of results.