This project will continue operation of the Connectome Coordination Facility (CCF) by capitalizing on the successes of the Human Connectome Project (HCP), which acquired, analyzed, and shared multimodal neuroimaging data and behavioral data on a large population of healthy adults. Major advances by the HCP include (i) the establishment of data acquisition protocols that yield high quality data across multiple modalities; (ii) the implementation of preprocessing pipelines that take full advantage of the high quality imaging data; and (iii) the establishment of a robust informatics infrastructure that has allowed widespread sharing of the HCP data within the neuroimaging and neuroscience communities. The CCF builds on these accomplishments and serves the human neuroimaging community in three ways.
One aim i s to provide consultation and support services to the research community for the primary purpose of harmonizing image acquisition protocols with those of the HCP. To this end, we have established a help desk whose support functions include transfer of data acquisition sequences and image reconstruction algorithms; providing updates and improvements for these sequences and algorithms; harmonization of imaging protocols and image reconstruction support for different software platforms and versions; and consultation for potential problems (e.g. image artifacts).
A second aim i s to provide services that maximize comparability of data acquired by CCF contributors. These services include pre-data acquisition guidance to contributors to ensure that each project?s behavioral data are obtained using HCP-compatible methods. This entails coordination with data contributors to develop and maitain mechanisms to streamline transfers of de-identified data from the study sites to the CCF database. The data from each study include the acquired images and all data associated with the project?s behavioral battery. Manual and automated quality control procedures based on existing HCP methods are executed to generate quality metrics that are published with the data. A standardized set of pipelines are then run in order to produce minimally preprocessed data that is fully harmonized with the other data sets in the CCF database.
A third aim i s to maintain the existing data repository infrastructure for Human Connectome Data and expand it to include connectome data from other research laboratories that are funded under the Connectomes Related to Human Diseases program. Together, these three aims enable the CCF to serve a central hub for connectomics data aggregation and harmonization. The CCF?s suite of harmonization services from data acquisition through data sharing ensure an unprecedented level of compatibility across data sets. The resulting database enables the scientific community to conduct novel analyses to better understand brain function in health and disease.
The mission of the Connectome Coordination Facility (CCF) is to make neuroimaging data about human brain structure, function, and connectivity widely available to the scientific community. This will provide investigators with resources to discover fundamental workings of the brain in health and disease and, in time, to develop improved diagnostics and therapies.
