Investigating the computational reproducibility of Neurodesk

Glatard et al [1] found that the operating system version affected the computational results of neuroimaging analysis pipelines. Their work demonstrated that this reproducibility issue is caused by the accumulated floating-point differences across operating systems. Neurodesk (www.neurodesk.org) approaches this problem by packaging every pipeline into a software container and thereby can control the underlying dependencies for each application regardless of the operating system. In this work, a brain tissue segmentation pipeline from the FMRIB Software Library (FSL) was compared with a containerised version from Neurodesk. The comparison revealed that Neurodesk provides computational reproducibility compared with local installations.