Gulf War Illness MRI (SFVAMC)

Structural brain MRI from a San Francisco VA Medical Center study of veterans deployed in the 1991 Gulf War. The study asked whether veterans with Gulf War illness show metabolic or structural brain differences once post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcohol misuse and depression are taken into account, and whether such differences track the neurological symptoms. Michael W. Weiner deposited the T1-weighted, proton density and T2-weighted images on Dryad in 2013 under CC0.

Composition

The Dryad record describes a project design of 200 veterans with Gulf War illness and 200 deployed veterans without it as controls, recruited in Northern California and nearby regions. The released image folders hold 262 subject IDs: 260 with all three contrasts and 2 with proton density and T2 only. File names carry a suffix X1 to X3, so most subjects have more than one volume per contrast; the record does not say whether these are repeat visits or repeat acquisitions. Four CSV files list the IDs per contrast. No diagnosis, demographics or clinical scores are part of the release.

Acquisition

All scans come from one Siemens Vision 1.5 T scanner at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. T1-weighted images are coronal MPRAGE (TR 9 ms, TE 4 ms, TI 300 ms); proton density and T2-weighted images come from an axial double spin echo (TR 2500 ms, TE 20 and 80 ms). In-plane resolution is 1 x 1 mm with 3 mm slices. One paper on the cohort dates the data collection to 2002 to 2007. The study also acquired MR spectroscopy, audiovestibular and neuropsychological measures, which are not in this release. Images are stored as raw 16-bit Analyze 7.5 pairs (.hdr and .img).

Known limitations

Without group labels or demographics, the release cannot be used for case-control analysis on its own. The 262 IDs fall short of the 400 subjects of the stated design, and the papers built on the cohort analyse different subsets (for example 81 with and 97 without Gulf War illness for spectroscopy). Images are unprocessed and in an old file format with thick 3 mm slices.