ARWiBo

ARWiBo (Alzheimer's Disease Repository Without Borders) gathers the clinical, neuropsychological, neuroimaging and biological data that researchers of the Laboratory of Alzheimer's Neuroimaging and Epidemiology at IRCCS Fatebenefratelli in Brescia, Italy, collected over roughly ten years from patients and healthy controls. The principal investigators are Giovanni Frisoni and Michela Pievani. The repository is shared through the neuGRID platform and is described as ongoing and growing, so its contents can change between versions.

Composition

The website describes ARWiBo as a cross-sectional database with data from more than 2700 people enrolled in Brescia and the surrounding area. It names three groups: healthy elderly controls, people with mild cognitive impairment and patients with Alzheimer's disease. A diagnosis chart on the same page gives the share of four groups, labelled CTR, NS-NDD, NS-PSY and Other, as percentages only. The data use agreement adds EEG to the data types and describes the cohort as patients with neurodegenerative diseases and healthy controls.

Acquisition

Structural MRI was acquired at 1.0 T or 1.5 T and includes 3D T1-weighted and MPR series, proton density, T2, T2* and fast spin echo series, and FLAIR. The scan type chart also lists diffusion tensor imaging, functional MRI, SPECT and FDG PET, each as a small share of all scans. All data are de-identified. The website does not give scanner vendors or protocol details.

Known limitations

• The official pages give the cohort size only as a lower bound and give diagnoses and scan types only as percentages, so the index has no exact counts per group or per contrast.
• Data come from a single clinical centre and region in northern Italy.
• The repository is cross-sectional, and the website gives no release dates or version history.
• Access needs an application reviewed by a scientific committee and a signed data use agreement, which also restricts the use of AI tools that do not keep the data contained.