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Open Imaging Index
MRI PET Brain

BioFINDER-2

The Swedish BioFINDER 2 Study (Biomarkers For Identifying Neurodegenerative Disorders Early and Reliably), BioFINDER-2

Brain MRI, tau PET and amyloid PET with CSF, blood and cognitive tests from adults who are cognitively healthy or have subjective decline, MCI, Alzheimer's disease or other dementias and parkinsonian disorders, followed for up to 8 years. Data on request.

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Overview

BioFINDER-2 is the second Swedish BioFINDER cohort, run by Lund University and Skåne University Hospital to find early and reliable markers of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and related disorders. It began in May 2017 as a larger, independent follow-up to BioFINDER-1, with tau PET planned for every participant alongside MRI, CSF and blood sampling and clinical and cognitive testing. Enrolment and follow-up are still running. BioFINDER-1 is not covered by this entry.

Composition

The overview page gives 2,960 participants. They are spread over five cohorts: cognitively healthy adults aged 40 to 65 (mostly from the Malmö Offspring study, with an auxiliary group aged 20 to 40), cognitively healthy adults aged 66 or older (from the Malmö Diet and Cancer study), memory clinic patients with subjective cognitive decline or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), patients with Alzheimer's dementia, and patients with other dementias and neurodegenerative disorders (frontotemporal dementia spectrum, vascular dementia, Parkinson's disease and related parkinsonian disorders). The healthy cohorts were enriched to about half APOE ε4 carriers. Healthy and SCD/MCI participants are followed for 6 to 8 years, the dementia cohorts for 2 years. Leuzy et al. (2020) analysed 613 participants enrolled up to August 2019 with [18F]RO948 PET: 257 unimpaired controls, 154 with MCI, 100 with Alzheimer's dementia and 102 with other disorders, including 25 with dementia with Lewy bodies and 7 with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia.

Acquisition

All cohorts are scanned on one 3 T Siemens MAGNETOM Prisma for about an hour without contrast: 3D MPRAGE, FLAIR, SWI, diffusion tensor imaging, functional MRI, arterial spin labelling and MR spectroscopy. Tau PET uses [18F]RO948 and amyloid PET uses [18F]flutemetamol, the latter only in participants without dementia. Papers report both on a digital GE Discovery MI. MRI and PET are repeated every 2 to 4 years depending on cohort. Dopamine transporter PET (first F-DOPA, later FE-PE2I) is done in parkinsonian cases; it is not listed under tracers here because no counts are published.

Known limitations

  • Images are not publicly released; papers state data are shared only on request with academic investigators.
  • Website cohort sizes are planned targets, and the number of participants with each scan type is not published.
  • Tau PET in the cohort with other dementias depended on funding.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 2,960 subjects.

PET tracer

  • [18F]RO948 613 21%

Table 1 in Leuzy A et al. 2020, Diagnostic performance of RO948 F 18 tau PET in the differentiation of Alzheimer disease from other neurodegenerative disorders, JAMA Neurology

Sex by pet tracer

Reported cross table. A dot marks a cell the source does not give.

[18F]RO948
Female316
Male297

Table 1 in Leuzy A et al. 2020, Diagnostic performance of RO948 F 18 tau PET in the differentiation of Alzheimer disease from other neurodegenerative disorders, JAMA Neurology

Condition by pet tracer

Reported cross table. A dot marks a cell the source does not give.

[18F]RO948
Healthy control257
Mild cognitive impairment154
Alzheimer's disease100
Parkinson's disease26
Progressive supranuclear palsy16
Frontotemporal dementia12
Vascular dementia10
Multiple system atrophy6

Table 1, Results in Leuzy A et al. 2020, Diagnostic performance of RO948 F 18 tau PET in the differentiation of Alzheimer disease from other neurodegenerative disorders, JAMA Neurology

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
On request

Ask the authors or the data holder. No published process or terms, and access is at their discretion

No data access page is published. Papers from the study state that anonymized data are shared on request with qualified academic investigators, under a material transfer agreement.

Access page

Swedish BioFINDER data availability statement (sharing on request under a material transfer agreement)

BioFINDER publishes no license or data use agreement. Its papers state that anonymized data are shared on request with qualified academic investigators, only to replicate the procedures and results of the article, when the transfer complies with the GDPR and Swedish ethics and Region Skåne decisions, under a material transfer agreement whose terms are not published.

Original license text Version read: Data availability statement as printed in Smith et al., Brain 2020 Checked 2026-10-12

What you can do

  • No
  • Not stated
  • Conditional
  • Not stated
  • Publish results Not stated

What you can share

  • Not stated
  • Share derived data Not stated
  • Share trained models Not stated

What you must do

  • No
  • Share alike No
  • Yes
  • Conditional
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Conditional

Citation

No dataset citation is requested. Cite the BioFINDER-2 papers whose results you use, e.g. Leuzy A, et al. Diagnostic performance of RO948 F 18 tau positron emission tomography in the differentiation of Alzheimer disease from other neurodegenerative disorders. JAMA Neurology 77, 955-965 (2020). doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2020.0989

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.