The Aging Adult Brain Connectome (AABC) consortium is pleased to announce its second release of imaging and non-imaging phenotypic data on the ConnectomeDB powered by BALSA platform. AABC Release 2 includes 632 additional sessions collected on participants from targeted groups newly recruited for AABC and more longitudinal visit data and followups (up to visit 4) from HCP-Aging (HCA) participants. It is inclusive of the previous AABC 1 Release.
AABC is a longitudinal follow-on study to the HCA study of typically aging participants ages 36-90+. AABC has recruited ~950 participants (legacy HCA and new) for two additional longitudinal visits, collecting up to four timepoints per participant to generate within-participant brain trajectories over spans of up to 10 years, enabling examination of vulnerability and resilience factors related to cognitive decline.
AABC Release 2 includes cross-sectional (V1) and longitudinal (V2, V3, V4) 3T MR scans and non-imaging phenotypic data from 1396 typically aging adults (ages 36-90+) in the HCP-Aging and AABC projects.
This includes data for 1396 V1, 915 V2, 471 V3, and 96 V4 sessions (total = 2878). It includes preprocessed and unprocessed imaging data for all included modalities (structural, high-res hippocampal T2 [unprocessed only], resting state fMRI, task fMRI, diffusion, and ASL) from 1390 participants in 2789 imaging visits. It also contains non-imaging data collected over a broad range of domains at imaging visits and in remote follow up surveys (non-imaging events). See session breakdowns by study and visit/event in Files tab.
Release 2 Highlights:
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Preprocessed and unprocessed structural MRI, resting state fMRI, task fMRI, diffusion MRI, ASL, and high-res hippocampal T2 [unprocessed only] data in modality-specific “HCP package” datasets downloadable from BALSA (see below).
- Most users should access Preprocessed Recommended fMRI data that have been cleaned of spatially and temporally specific structured noise and precisely aligned across subjects by multimodal cortical surface registration (MSMAll) using HCP pipelines that have been developed specifically for HCP-style data.
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3T Multi-modal Imaging Derived Phenotypes (IDPs) for released participant sessions available in CSV (zip archives in IDPs tab) and Connectome Workbench-compatible CIFTI imaging package formats.
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7 T Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) brain metabolite data are available for 282 participant visits.
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Non-imaging behavioral and biomeasure data available for released participant sessions and follow up events.
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Core Variables, high interest primary variables and summary scores, including MRS brain metabolites, can be viewed and filtered in the BALSA UI (use Column Selector to add, Export CSV to download all Core Variables or selected subset).
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3,000 Extended (XL) variables, including item-level and follow up event variables, for all participant events available in a comprehensive spreadsheet. See Data Dictionary for descriptions of included variables.
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NIH Toolbox raw and score data for in-person visits are available as spreadsheets/zip archive.
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Visualization instructions and HCA1798 group average template data for visualizing HCP pipelines output, including IDPs, in Connectome Workbench wb_view.
Get Access and Download the data: Get started by Registering for BALSA, click on the “ConnectomeDB” tab, and agree to the AABC Data Use Terms. An academic, non-profit, or government email address is required to agree to the AABC Data Use Terms and access the data.
To download imaging data, you must 1) install Aspera Connect (scroll down to “IBM Aspera client-deployed software” to find Aspera Connect download links) and 2) an Aspera Connect plugin for your browser (available from Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.). Set Preferences>Transfers in Aspera Connect to a directory with sufficient space for large downloads.
Use the Column Selector and Export CSV to view, filter on, and download all or subsets of Core Variables for selected subjects. To download the full non-imaging data, click the Files tab and Download under AABC_Release2_Non-imaging_Data-XL.csv.
Join the Community. If you are actively using HCP data and tools, we encourage you to join and be active in the HCP-Users Google group, so that you can tune in to technical discussions on issues that may be of interest. Once you have joined (posts from nonmembers are moderated to control spam), post questions to hcp-users@humanconnectome.org.
Share your Analyses. As you work with AABC data and prepare your work for publication, we encourage you to use Connectome Workbench to prepare your figures as scenes and upload your scenes as a BALSA dataset that can be linked from your publication.
Stay Tuned! In coming months, we will be working on improvements to ConnectomeDB powered by BALSA to enable additional ways to transfer data via command line and other transfer services we are exploring. We will announce updates on the HCP-Users group!
Best,
AABC Consortium