BRAIN project: OpenNeuroPET: An Archive for PET data

National Institute Of Mental Health

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

Background In recent years, the importance of data sharing has increasingly been recognized by the neuroimaging community because of the poor replicability of findings, the need for appropriate quality control, the greater statistical power provided by larger samples, and the higher scientific impact of multilateral collaborations. Our funding bodies and scientific journals also increasingly encourage or require that the data be shared. However, data sharing can be clumsy and cumbersome in the absence of well articulated guidelines, clear data formatting standards, and well managed repositories. Building on the recommendations of leaders in the PET field, and in collaboration with other highly successful repositories of human neuroimaging data, an application was submitted to the NIH BRAIN initiative for funding to establish a useful and freely-shared repository for human brain PET data. That application was favorably reviewed and awarded funding in 2021 and our work commenced. Standards & Nomenclature From the beginning, we have understood that open standards for both nomenclatures and data formats were critical to this project's success. Following a highly collaborative process including a wide array of leading PET researchers in the field, our paper on consensus nomenclature was published last year in Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism. The next step was to standardize PET data formats for sharing. Our colleagues in Copenhagen led the effort to establish this new standard as an extension to the Brain Imaging Data Standard (BIDS). This standard was finalized earlier this year and the associated paper is now on the bioRxiv preprint server. Tools Another critical part of this project was to build tools that make conversion to and manipulation of BIDS formatted PET data. We have hired a software engineer to build a tools that will take data as it comes off of the PET scanner and additional information such as radiotracer concentration blood measurements) and convert them into a standard BIDS dataset. We are also collaborating with the authors of leading PET analysis software packages (e.g. Doug Greve author of PET Surfer) to make BIDS-formatted PET dataset easily loaded and analyzed. This work is on going. Repository Finally this project requires a data repository that is well-designed, easy-to-use, and built upon community standards. For this we have contracted the team that built the original OpenNeuro site, Squishy Media. We have been working with them intensively over the past 10 months to build out the site. The new site will not only advance PET data sharing, but will also allow OpenNeuro to better integrate many other neuroimage modalities for which new BIDS specification have recently been published (e.g. EEG, iEEG, MEG) At the time of this writing we have just submitted feedback on the final release candidate for the repository. We expect this site to be available to the public before the end of the calendar year.