Golia Shafiei
CIHR Postdoctoral Fellow | PennLINC
Department of Psychiatry (OxCIN)
University of Pennsylvania
Major mental illnesses are increasingly understood as disorders of brain development. Neuroimaging studies of brain development can help track healthy brain maturation and have the potential to identify deviations from normal development linked to psychopathology. However, large and diverse samples are required to capture reliable neurodevelopmental patterns on the population level. While it is possible to aggregate data across multiple resources, data aggregation is not a straightforward process given the differences in neuroimaging and psychiatric phenotyping protocols used by independent studies. To this end, we introduce Reproducible Brain Charts (RBC), an open data resource that integrates data from five large and prominent studies of brain development in youth from three continents. We used bifactor models to generate harmonized psychiatric phenotypes that capture major dimensions of psychopathology. Additionally, we applied rigorous quality assurance protocols and used uniform and consistent pipelines to carefully curate and process neuroimaging data in a reproducible manner. All RBC data–including harmonized psychiatric phenotypes, unprocessed neuroimaging data, and fully processed imaging derivatives–are publicly shared without a data use agreement via the International Neuroimaging Data-sharing Initiative. Taken together, RBC facilitates large-scale, robust, and reproducible research in developmental and psychiatric neuroscience.
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