May 29^th:

• Storage Tiering: Data stored on XNAT will now dynamically change the tier of storage for datasets based on usage. Sessions that have been interacted with in the past 7 days (uploaded, viewed, run a pipeline) will be able to be interacted with as normal. After 7 days of no interaction, sessions will move to a slower archiving tier (300ms access instead of <10ms per file), decimating the cost. Users can interact with the data with additional delays, or can preload data to be highly available for a 7 day period. This change allows the service to store an order of magnitude more data.
• XNAT Hardware Upgrade: We have doubled the CPU and RAM allocations as well as made improvements to caching size to better cope with increased demands.
• XNAT Software Update: We have upgraded to 1.7.6.RAD. See XNAT News for release notes.
• AAF fix: There was a bug caused by one of the XNAT updates which broken AAF authentication for external users. This has now been fixed.
• XNAT Reporting: Additional metadata fields are now able to be searched in reporting. Additionally reporting can be done for individual
• Improved Auditing: We have new capability for auditing user access for sensitive data. Part of this is user facing with documentation to come.

February 28^th:

• DashR Integration: Researchers are now able to create projects on XNAT using DashR in the same manner as requesting RDS and Artemis allocations. See the DashR-IDS FAQ for more information.
• XNAT Reporting: Weekly system reports (accessible to ICT and Sydney Imaging) have been developed to provide a high level overview of the usage of the platform, including number of patients, scans, and data on a per project level and login activity.
• CTP Monitoring: The I-Med Radiologics CTP used by BMC researchers and the Sydney Imaging CTP used by Hybrid Theatre and Preclinical users have been integrated with active monitoring tools. These will better alert ICT to potential issues before they become problematic.
• Hybrid Theatre Artis Pheno: The HT Artis Pheno now has a direct connection to the Imaging Data Service, able to both push and pull DICOM data as it would with a standard PACS. Migration of historical user data of the Artis Pheno will be starting next month.
• Stored Searches: Over zealous security was blocking users from creating saved searches. This had now been fixed.

2019

November 7^th:

• Updated XNAT's underlying hardware.

October 30^th:

• XNAT Upgrade: We have upgraded XNAT from 1.7.5.3 to 1.7.5.6. See XNAT News for release notes.
• Australian Access Federation (AAF): External users from Australian research and health institutions are now able to use AAF to log into XNAT. As part of this change, existing unikey users will need to follow a once process.
• VPN no more!: XNAT is now available outside of the intranet meaning users no longer require a VPN to access the service remotely.
• Security Upgrades: As part of exposing XNAT outside the network to external users, a large security audit was performed and items addressed.
• Auto-Registration: To streamline the registration process, users from from approved institutions will now be auto-registered to XNAT. By default, they won't have access to any projects. CIs or Project Owners will need to add new users to their projects.
• Prearchive Lockdown: The prearchive has been made accessible only to Site Managers to improve security with the number of new external users on the system.
• OHIF Viewer: We have implemented the Open Health Imaging Foundation (OHIF) DICOM viewer in XNAT. This has considerably more features and is more performant than the old built-in viewer.

August 1^st:

• XNAT's underlying hardware was upgraded with more RAM and CPU to help meet the growing amount of data uploads. General usage should be improved as well as stability during large concurrent DICOM uploads.

May 24^th:

• Docker Container Pipelines on Artemis. Currently limited to DICOM to NIFTI conversion, the new integration can be expanded with further containerized pipelines.

May 14^th:

• Docker Container Pipelines on AWS Docker Swarm
• (Admin) DevOps CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) in our Development and Test environment
  
• Update XNAT to 1.7.5.3 (Release Notes) resolving the below issues:
  • Download and Backend Issues Resolved
  • UI behaviors improved
  • Remove Session Time Reset on Zip Download
  • Download large image sets
  • Duplicate file names cause incomplete download when attempting to include subject/project in file path
  • Improper caching of data access when user added to project
  • Apostrophes in project titles and metadata fields are rendering poorly
  • Don't force a page reload when deleting scans

Feel free to refer to the "IDS2 XNAT Upgrade Release Notes.pdf"

For more details please see: XNAT Upgrade to 1.7.5.3 and Docker Swarm Pipeline User Guide release notes - May 2019