Improving usage of the Aphasia Research Cohort (ARC) repository

University Of South Carolina At Columbia, Columbia SC

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract The Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery (C-STAR) explores recovery from language impairments following stroke. Over the course of the last 18 years, through both internally supported and NIH-funded awards, this database has grown to include over 5700 MRI scans from 250 stroke survivors. This trove of data is publicly accessible to researchers and scientists around the world via the OpenNeuro NIH-supported biomedical data repository known as the Aphasia Recovery Cohort (ARC). Historically, clinical neuroimaging has been analyzed by small, siloed teams like our own, who have developed specialized tools to handle the unusual properties of clinical data. Our objective is to develop a framework that will allow scientists around the world to process and analyze clinical neuroimaging datasets to make new discoveries. By creating a pipeline that handles the common pitfalls, experts from other domains can contribute innovative solutions, creating a virtuous feedback cycle. Our framework will also help other clinical teams share and exploit their datasets, easing compliance with resource sharing plans and exploiting large distributed datasets. By increasing compliance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) principles, we will increase the ability of researchers to examine not only our stroke data, but also stroke data from other repositories. Specifically, we will leverage NeuroDesk, an online platform preinstalled with image-processing software to disseminate a novel stroke-specific processing and analysis package, lesionPrep, which will facilitate usage of the ARC and similar datasets.