A longitudinal multi-scanner multimodal human neuroimaging dataset

Abstract

Human neuroimaging has led to an overwhelming amount of research into brain function in healthy and clinical populations. However, a better appreciation of the limitations of small sample studies has led to an increased number of multi-site, multi-scanner protocols to understand human brain function. As part of a multi-site project examining social cognition in schizophrenia, a group of "travelling human phantoms" had structural T1, diffusion, and resting-state functional MRIs obtained annually at each of three sites. Scan protocols were carefully harmonized across sites prior to the study. Due to scanner upgrades at each site (all sites acquired PRISMA MRIs during the study) and one participant being replaced, the end result was 30 MRI scans across 4 people, 6 MRIs, and 4 years. This dataset includes multiple neuroimaging modalities and repeated scans across six MRIs. It can be used to evaluate differences across scanners, consistency of pipeline outputs, or test multi-scanner harmonization approaches.

Fig. 1

Schematic of participants scanned at each MRI by year. Prisma scanners are shown in gray.

Fig. 2

MRI quality metrics for each scan, organized by participant (boxplot). The scanner is identified via different markers. The bottom and top of the boxes correspond, respectively, to the first and third quartiles. The upper and lower whiskers extend to the largest/smallest values at a maximum of 1.5*IQR away from the box, and data beyond the ends of whiskers are outliers.