Making Connections in the Connectome Era

Excerpt

As Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Star Wars movies fame could have told you, there was a substantial shift in the (data sharing) force recently. With the public release of the “1000 Functional Conectomes” project¹ at the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and resources Clearinghouse (Biswal et al. 2010; Luo et al. 2009), an order of magnitude more resting state fMRI data is now freely available in the public domain. Collected from over 30 sites, and comprising resting state fMRI data from over 1,200 individual subjects, the “1000 Functional Conectomes” project promotes both data and methodological sharing, and quantitatively demonstrates the power of pooled data analysis. The effort has seen a great public response (Dolgin 2010; Pastrana 2010), including mention in the National Institute of Mental Health director’s blog², and has engendered over 4,000 dataset downloads in it’s first 3 months in the public domain. Biswal et al. (2010) demonstrate a consistent architecture of positive and negative functional correlations as well as a consistent pattern of inter-individual foci of variability. In the normal population, these patterns of functional connectivity are modulated by age and gender. Overall, the report supports the suggestion that resting state fMRI data can (and indeed should) be aggregated and shared. …