MRI Repository/Existing Third-Party Repositories

This page is excerpted from emails between Jadrian and David in June 2010.

BIRN has two websites: one for a multi-university research consortium that include labs across the US (MGH, UCLA, Cal Tech, JHU, WUSTL, etc.) and another for "a national initiative to advance biomedical research through data sharing and online collaboration" funded by the NIH. The two relevant websites are <http://www.loni.ucla.edu/BIRN/> and <http://www.birncommunity.org/>. I get the impression that the former is in some sense an instantiation of the latter --- the UCLA BIRN is an active group of researchers collecting and sharing data, while the national BIRN is the think-tank that organized it or provided the framework.

The specific goals of BIRN right now cover three areas: human brain morphometry, human brain functional imaging, and mouse stuff. The idea is to establish common protocols and have many different facilities gather data over a wide subject base. Someone was talking about this recently, I think; was it Sean Deoni?

<http://www.loni.ucla.edu/BIRN/Data/> has info about their acquisition protocols. For humans, they're only doing a plain structural scan (I can't tell from their protocol what it actually is) and functional stuff. For mice, they're doing DTI and histology, but all the DTI scans are performed at Cal Tech, and they don't specify the number of gradient directions they're collecting. From the sounds of it, they haven't collected a lot of mouse data so far.

BIRN might be a good resource for getting paired histology and diffusion MRI data for mice, but it's not a public database, nor a clearinghouse for any old data you care to give them, at least not right now. As such I don't think we have anything to contribute to them, though Steve might be interested in sending them human data.

ADNI is the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, and, strangely enough, is another UCLA-centric, NIH-spurred, multi-facility imaging initiative: the project website is <http://www.loni.ucla.edu/ADNI/> and the initiative website is <http://www.adni-info.org/>. Other initiatives that UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging has their hands in are the ICBM (international consortium for brain mapping) and MAP (mouse atlas project), as linked at <http://www.loni.ucla.edu/>.

ICBM catalogues significant brain atlases, including Mori's 81-subject DTI-based atlas.

<http://capitalimaging.org> has a bunch of TBI studies with a 90 minute MRI acquisition that includes diffusion and pretty much everything else.