Cam-CAN

Cam-CAN is a study of healthy cognitive ageing run by the University of Cambridge and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Its second stage (also called CC700) combined brain MRI, MEG and an extensive cognitive battery in a population-based sample spread evenly across the adult lifespan, and is widely used for brain age modelling, normative modelling and studies of how brain structure and function change with age.

Composition

Stage 2 aimed for 100 people per decade from 18 to 88 (50 men and 50 women each), drawn from about 2,700 adults interviewed at home in Stage 1. The repository paper reports 656 participants aged 18 to 87; recruitment fell short only in the youngest decade. The current data portal lists, per modality, 653 T1-weighted and T2-weighted scans, 642 diffusion scans, 623 magnetization transfer scans and about 650 each of resting-state, movie-watching and sensorimotor fMRI, plus MEG at rest and during tasks. Approved requests also get basic tables with age, sex, handedness and education. Later phases (a frail arm of about 80 people and a 280-person follow-up with further scans) are offered as separate datasets.

Acquisition

All MRI was acquired at one site on a 3T Siemens TIM Trio with a 32-channel head coil in a single one-hour session: 1 mm MPRAGE and SPACE T2, two-shell diffusion with 30 directions per shell, magnetization transfer, and EPI fMRI (the movie run used multi-echo EPI). The scanner's gradient coil was replaced after the first 97 participants, which is flagged in the data. Structural images were defaced and the data are distributed in BIDS.

Annotations

There are no image labels. The repository provides preprocessed outputs from the automatic analysis (aa) pipeline and a large set of cognitive, physiological and questionnaire measures.

Known limitations

• Participants had to be cognitively healthy and free of serious neurological or psychiatric illness, and willing to be scanned, so the sample is healthier than the general population.
• Access is limited to approved non-commercial projects; students must ask a supervisor to apply.
• Group sizes by age and sex beyond the youngest decade are not published in the sources used here.