The Institute of Psychology is proud to announce the open release of the Consortium for Reproducibility and Reliability (CoRR) dataset. Consisting of resting-state fMRI (RFMRI) and anatomical imaging scans repeated on 2 or more occasions in over 1500 individuals (over 4000 resting fMRI data sets in total) across 17 institutions around the world, this is an unprecedented resource from which the reliability of MRI-based imaging modalities can be determined. The initiative’s open science philosophy allows users to share the data via the 1000 Functional Connectomes Project and its International Neuroimaging Data-sharing Initiative (FCP/INDI), which were launched in 2010, and now contains more than 10,000 brain images. This newest FCP/INDI effort is set to release later this week on June 7th.
The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) have been instrumental in the CoRR collaboration providing the necessary funding and manpower to build the foundation of the project along with the Institute of Psychology, the Child Mind Institute and the Nathan Kline Institute. These funds reflect NSFC’s and NIDA’s commitment to the promotion of open science as a means of advancing our understanding of the brain.
Although commonly overlooked, the establishment of reliability and reproducibility is a critical first step for any effort to use brain imaging to map variations in the brain from one individual to the next, or to identify biomarkers for clinical illnesses in neurology and psychiatry. CoRR will enable users to determine the range of variations that are reliable and can be reproduced across time and imaging sites. The ultimate goal of CoRR is to create a standard benchmark test-retest sample for the evaluation of novel metrics in mental health disorders and brain diseases.
The focus of the data in CoRR is on basic phenotypic measures used by neuroimaging specialists that are fundamental for analyses. CoRR will aid the current standards by organizing phenotypes into three variables:
· Core variables required to characterize any dataset.
· Referred variables that are strongly suggested for inclusion due to their relative import and/or likelihood of being collected by most sites globally.
· Optional variables that are data-set specific or only shared by a few testing sites globally.
CoRR is organized by a team of scientists, engineers and technicians actively taking on the challenge of exploring brain development in healthy and clinical populations, with the goal of identifying the signatures of mental illness and markers of treatment response. The team is headed up with ZUO Xi-Nian of the Institute of Psychology and Michael P. Milham of the Child Mind Institute and Nathan Kline Institute. Neuroinformatics support was provided by a team led by Vince D. Calhoun at the Mind Research Network, which is hosting the data on the COINS data exchange (http://coins.mrn.org/dx).
The Institute of Psychology has taken a leading role in the promotion of test-retest reliability and reproducibility as well as the standardization of protocols in human functional brain connectomics. Supported by the grants from both NSFC and CAS, the team led by Dr. ZUO Xi-Nian , deputy director of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center, has extensively investigated the test-retest reliability of RFMRI measurements in functional connectomics, which was reviewed in a paper recently published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews . This review not only discusses the main issues with low reliability related to sub-optimal design and the choice of data processing options but also calls large-sample test-retest data to rectify both the within-subjects and between-subjects variability of RFMRI measurements and accelerate the application of functional connectomics. Now, the release of CoRR echoes this call and will speed up the standardization on the protocols in human brain connectomics.
For more on CoRR visit:
http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/CoRR/html/index.html
