Preprocessing of functional MRI (fMRI) involves numerous steps to clean and standardize data before statistical analysis. Generally, researchers create ad-hoc preprocessing workflows for each new dataset, building upon a large inventory of tools available. The complexity of these workflows has snowballed with rapid advances in acquisition and processing. We introduce fMRIPrep , an analysis-agnostic tool that addresses the challenge of robust and reproducible preprocessing for fMRI data. FMRIPrep automatically adapts a best-in-breed workflow to the idiosyncrasies of virtually any dataset, ensuring high-quality preprocessing with no manual intervention. By introducing visual assessment checkpoints into an iterative integration framework for software-testing, we show that fMRIPrep robustly produces high-quality results on a diverse fMRI data collection. Additionally, fMRIPrep introduces less uncontrolled spatial smoothness than commonly used preprocessing tools. FMRIPrep equips neuroscientists with a high-quality, robust, easy-to-use and transparent preprocessing workflow, which can help ensure the validity of inference and the interpretability of their results.

Preprocessing of functional MRI (fMRI) involves numerous steps to clean and standardize data 24Preprocessing of fMRI in a nutshell, for a summary). Extracting a signal that is most faithful to the 25 underlying neural activity is crucial to ensure the validity of inference and interpretability of results 6 .

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a standard tool to investigate the neural correlates of cognition. fMRI noninvasively measures brain activity, allowing identification of patterns evoked by tasks performed during scanning. Despite the long history of this technique, the idiosyncrasies of each dataset have led to the use of ad-hoc preprocessing protocols customized for nearly every different study. This approach is time-consuming, error-prone, and unsuitable for combining datasets from many sources. Here we showcase fMRIPrep ( http://fmriprep.org ), a robust tool to prepare human fMRI data for statistical analysis. This software instrument addresses the reproducibility concerns of the established protocols for fMRI preprocessing. By leveraging the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) to standardize both the input datasets -MRI data as stored by the scanner-and the outputs -data ready for modeling and analysis-, fMRIPrep is capable of preprocessing a diversity of datasets without manual intervention. In support of the growing popularity of fMRIPrep , this protocol describes how to integrate the tool in a task-based fMRI investigation workflow.