The R-fMRI Maps Project

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the launch of the R-fMRI Maps project.

The aim of the R-fMRI Maps project is to build a big data of intrinsic brain activity indices, which has the potential to allow us addressing critical questions about the brain. Here we share a broad array of the R-fMRI indices of open R-fMRI data (through a standard processing pipeline built in DPABI/DPARSF), and encourage researchers share their processed R-fMRI indices to public through the R-fMRI Maps project.

Recently, data-sharing initiatives (e.g., FCP/INDI, openfMRI, fMRIDC from the grassroots and ADNI, HCP, NDAR, PING from coordinated) enabled big data research model in the brain imaging community. However, raw data sharing requires intensive coordinating efforts, huge manpower demand and large-amount data storing/management facilities. Furthermore, sharing raw data is mired with privacy concerns arising from possibility of being able to identify participants from high dimensional raw data. These concerns, together with the demands of data organization and the limit of large data uploading, prevents a wider imaging community to share their valuable brain imaging datasets to public.

The R-fMRI Maps project was designed to address the above concerns by only sharing the final R-fMRI indices, which only needs light data storing/uploading requirements and removed the privacy concerns on raw data. The project provides a convenient data organizer GUI integrated in DPABI/DPARSF to facilitate efficient data organization. Furthermore, by sharing the processed R-fMRI indices, the projects removed the barriers of computational resources as well as analytic knowledge for the users, thus allows a wider scientific community (especially for machine learning experts) to join in the endeavor of understanding the brain.

With the R-fMRI Maps project, we hope to build an unprecedented big data of brain imaging across a wide variety of individuals: including different neurological and psychiatric disease, as well as healthy people with different traits. We hope such a big data could help to address the need for a neuroscience-based classification approach for parsing a large variety psychiatric illness, as called by the NIMH RDoC Project. We hope more exciting neuroscience findings could be fostered by such a project, and future innovative model could be inspired by it.

We sincerely hope you could join us, either downloading and utilizing the shared data, or sharing your data with this project. If you have further questions, please refer to http://rfmri.org/RfMRIMapsDiscussion to discuss.