Open Science Resource for the Neuroimaging Community Facilitates the Assessment of Test-Retest Reliability and Reproducibility for Functional and Structural Connectomics

Organized by Consortium Founders Michael P. Milham, MD, PhD of the Child Mind Institute/Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research; Xi-Nian Zuo, PhD of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; in collaboration with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)

Newswise — (NEW YORK, NY – June 6, 2013) – The Child Mind Institute is proud to announce the open release of the Consortium for Reproducibility and Reliability (CoRR) dataset.

Consisting of resting state fMRI (R-fMRI) and anatomical imaging scans repeated on 2 or more occasions in over 1500 individuals (over 5000 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 by Michael P. Milham, MD, PhD, director of the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute, 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 Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) have been instrumental in the CoRR collaboration, providing the necessary funding and manpower to build the foundation of the project along with the Child Mind Institute, the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Nathan Kline Institute. These funds reflect NIDA’s and NSFC’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 are critical first steps 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 CoRR dataset focuses on the basic phenotypic measures used by neuroimaging specialists that are fundamental to analysis. CoRR will improve current standards by organizing phenotypes into three groups:

• 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 Dr. Milham, also of the Nathan Kline Institute, and Xi-Nian Zuo of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. 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). Data is also available at: http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/
The Child Mind Institute takes a leading role in the promotion of open neuroscience and the movement to make scientific data, tools, and knowledge accessible to all researchers through the sponsorship of ongoing open efforts and the creation of novel initiatives.

The Child Mind Institute is the proud sponsor of FCP/INDI, open neuroscience initiatives that have provided researchers around the world with literally thousands of brain scans of typically developing and clinical populations. In just over two years, the open sharing of data by these efforts has led to more than two dozens papers by independent investigators around the world and received NIMH accolades, including citation in the NIMH Director's Top 10 Research Advances and Events in both 2010 and 2011. Recent INDI sharing efforts that focus on data from children with mental illness, including the ADHD-200 and Autism Brain Image Data Exchange (ABIDE), promise to rapidly expand the imaging community's work on the examination of child mental health. The INDI has served as a guiding light for the in-house efforts of the Child Mind Institute, where the Center for the Developing Brain (CDB) aims to make the sharing of all imaging data the norm.

For more on CoRR visit:
http://fcon_1000.projects.nitrc.org/indi/CoRR/html/index.html

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About the Child Mind Institute (childmind.org)
The Child Mind Institute is dedicated to transforming mental health care for children everywhere. Founded by Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz and Brooke Garber Neidich, our organization is committed to finding more effective treatments for childhood psychiatric and learning disorders, building the science of healthy brain development, and empowering children and their families with help, hope, and answers. The Child Mind Institute does not accept funding from the pharmaceutical industry.

Press Contacts:
Edelman for the Child Mind Institute

212-642-7731
Mechal.Weiss@edelman.com

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