AABC Release 1 of HCP-Aging & AABC Data 

The Aging Adult Brain Connectome (AABC) consortium is pleased to announce its initial release of imaging and non-imaging phenotypic data on the ConnectomeDB powered by BALSA platform. This includes data for all HCP-Aging (HCA) participants and visits, plus an initial set of AABC visits.

 

AABC is a longitudinal follow-on study to the HCA study of healthy participants ages 36-90+. AABC is recruiting 1000 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 1 includes cross-sectional (V1) and longitudinal (V2, V3) 3T MR scans and non-imaging data from 1248 healthy older adults (ages 36-90+) in the HCP-Aging and AABC projects. It includes multi-modal preprocessed (including with FreeSurfer) and unprocessed imaging data from 1248 participants across 2214 imaging visits (many subjects have data from more than one visit). It also contains non-imaging data collected over a broad range of domains for 1248 V1, 762 V2, and 236 V3 (2246 total) in-person visits and remote follow up surveys (non-imaging events). See session breakdowns by study and visit/event.

 

7 T Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) data are available for 138 participants. Multi-modal Imaging Derived Phenotypes (IDPs) are available for participants with imaging data.

Release 1 Highlights:

• Preprocessed and unprocessed structural MRI, resting state fMRI, task fMRI, diffusion MRI, and ASL 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).
• 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.
• 7 T Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) brain metabolite data are available for 138 participants.
• Non-imaging behavioral and biomeasure data available for released participant sessions and follow up events.

• 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).
• >3,000 Extended variables, including item-level and follow up event variables, for all participant events available in a comprehensive spreadsheet.
• NIH Toolbox raw and score data for in-person visits are available as spreadsheets/zip archive.

• 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.

 

To download the full non-imaging data, click the Files tab and Download under AABC_Release1_Non-imaging_Data-XL.csv. Use the Column Selector and Export CSV to view, filter on, and download all or subsets of Core Variables for selected subjects.

 

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.  

 

Stay Tuned! In addition to this release, we are actively preparing AABC Release 2 to be made public soon. It will include 600+ more participant session data and other minor updates. We will announce Release 2 on the HCP-Users group, so yet another reason to join!

 

Best,

AABC Consortium