We are happy to announce the first data release as part of the CANDIShare project. CANDIShare is a project to release a series of structural brain images, as well as their anatomic segmentations, demographic and behavioral data and a set of related morphometric resources. Over 250 children (typically developing and various psychiatric disorders) will be part of this release.

This first release is the CMA preprocessed images of the Healthy Control subjects group (N=29) from the article: Frazier JA, Hodge SM, Breeze JL, Giuliano AJ, Terry JE, Moore CM, Kennedy DN, Lopez-Larson MP, Caviness VS, Seidman LJ, Zablotsky B, Makris N. Diagnostic and sex effects on limbic volumes in early-onset bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Schizophr Bull. 2008 Jan;34(1):37-46. (see http://www.nitrc.org/docman/view.php/377...)

The data release is located at: http://www.nitrc.org/frs/download.php/22...
See release notes at: http://www.nitrc.org/frs/shownotes.php?r...

Subsequent releases over the next few months will comprise the other diagnostic groups (bipolar disorder without psychosis (BPDwithoutPsy), bipolar disorder with psychosis (BPDwithPsy) and schizophrenia spectrum (SS)) as well as the 'general segmentation' and 'cortical parcellation' for each.

Release Description:
The release is provided as a gziped tar file of a set of directories containing the data.

The root directory is for the paper, SchizBull_2008/, and contains subdirectories for the 4 diagnostic groups: Healthy Controls (HC), bipolar disorder without psychosis (BPDwithoutPsy), bipolar disorder with psychosis (BPDwithPsy) and schizophrenia spectrum (SS). Each of these subdirectories will contain separate subdirectories for each subject. These subject directories will contain the CMA preprocessed image that was submitted to the anatomic segmentation process, and the results of the general segmentation and cortical parcellation (when available). These files will be NIfTI.gz and called {$SUBJECT_ID}_{$TYPE}.nii.gz; where $TYPE will be 'procimg' for preprocessed images, 'seg' for general segmentation, and 'parc' for cortical parcellation results. The seg and parc analysis results are 'n-ary' images, where the fill value represents the specific anatomic region.

The nature of the CMA preprocessing includes positional normalization to put the image into the standard orientation of the Talairach coordinate space, and bias field correction as described in: Worth AJ, Makris N, Patti MR, Goodman JM, Hoge EA, Caviness VS Jr, Kennedy DN. Precise segmentation of the lateral ventricles and caudate nucleus in MR brain images using anatomically driven histograms. IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 1998 Apr;17(2):303-10.

Diagnostic group basic demographic information is provided in the diagnostic subdirectory in a .csv file entitled {$DIAG}_Basic_Demographics.csv. This file contains age, gender, and handedness for each of the subjects in the diagnostic group.

How to view the images? Any NIfTI-compatible viewer should work. We've used fslview (http://www.nitrc.org/projects/fsl), Mango (http://www.nitrc.org/projects/mango), neurolens (http://www.nitrc.org/projects/nldo) etc.

A snapshot of HC_001 in Mango is attached.

We have selected the Creative Commons Attribution license for this release. To remind you, the highlight of this is:
Attribution
License > Creative Commons License > Attribution
From http://creativecommons.org/about/license... This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

When using this material, please site the original manuscript: Frazier JA, Hodge SM, Breeze JL, Giuliano AJ, Terry JE, Moore CM, Kennedy DN, Lopez-Larson MP, Caviness VS, Seidman LJ, Zablotsky B, Makris N. Diagnostic and sex effects on limbic volumes in early-onset bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Schizophr Bull. 2008 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18003...); and cite acknowledge the NITRC project (http://www.nitrc.org/projects/candi_shar...).

Images were acquired at the McLean Hospital Brain Imaging Center on a 1.5 Tesla General Electric Signa Scanner. The overall protocol included a conventional T1-weighted sagittal scout series, a proton density/T2-weighted interleaved doubleecho axial series, and a three-dimensional inversion recovery-prepped spoiled grass coronal series. All scans were reviewed by a neuroradiologist to rule out clinically significant abnormalities.

The volumetric scan was a three-dimensional inversion recovery-prepped spoiled gradient recalled echo coronal series, with 124 slices, prep=300 msec, TE=minimum, flip angle=25°, field of view=24 cm2, slice thickness=1.5 mm, acquisition matrix= 256×192, and number of excitations=2.