Scientific Notebook Software: Applications for Academic Radiology.

OBJECTIVES

The goal of this article is to introduce the concept of scientific notebook software, and to illustrate how it can be used to document a research project, to perform image analysis and to create interactive teaching tools.

METHODS

We describe the installation of scientific notebook software known as Project Jupyter, which is free, open-source and available for the Macintosh, Windows and Linux operating systems.

RESULTS

We have created 2 scientific notebooks that demonstrate applications germane to radiologists, particularly those in academic radiology. The first notebook provides a tutorial that summarizes basic features of the Project Jupyter notebook, and gives numerous examples of how the notebooks can display explicatory text, perform statistical computations, and display plots, interactive graphics, and audio files. The second notebook provides a toolbox for viewing and manipulating images in the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine format.

CONCLUSIONS

Scientific notebook software allows its users to document their work in a form that combines text, graphics, images, data, interactive calculations and image analysis within a single document. Scientific notebooks also provide interactive teaching tools, which are can help explain complex topics in imaging physics to residents.