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Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

Hearing loss Connectome (ds005026)

Structural, diffusion and resting-state functional brain MRI of older adults with age-related hearing loss and of normal-hearing controls, collected to study whole-brain functional and structural connectivity changes, including cross-modal reorganization of visual networks. 82 participants scanned in Italy.

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Overview

Raw brain MRI from a University of Salerno study that compared older adults with age-related sensorineural hearing loss against people with normal hearing. The group built whole-brain connectomes from resting-state functional connectivity and probabilistic tractography and analysed them with graph theory. Their 2022 paper in Neurobiology of Aging reported that hearing loss went along with a reorganized visual subnetwork, read as cross-modal compensation for reduced hearing. Sara Ponticorvo and Fabrizio Esposito uploaded the images to OpenNeuro as snapshot 1.0.0 in March 2024 under a CC0 waiver. The work was funded by Amplifon SpA.

Composition

There are 82 participants, each with one session: 52 with hearing loss and 30 normal-hearing controls, aged 47 to 78. The participants table gives only group, age and sex. The hearing loss group is mostly male (36 of 52), while the control group is mostly female (20 of 30), and the patients are on average about four years older. Audiometric thresholds and the neurological and neuropsychological scores collected in the study are not part of the release.

Acquisition

All images come from a Siemens Skyra 3 T scanner with a 16-channel head and neck coil, according to the JSON sidecars, which name the San Giovanni hospital in Salerno as the institution. Each participant has a 3D T1-weighted MPRAGE image with 1 mm slices, a diffusion series with 64 directions at b = 1500 s/mm² plus one b = 0 volume (2 mm slices, anterior-posterior phase encoding) and a resting-state BOLD run with multiband factor 4 and a repetition time of 1 s. Single-band reference images in both phase-encoding directions come with the BOLD and diffusion series and can serve for distortion correction. Data are in BIDS with NIfTI images and JSON sidecars.

Known limitations

  • Single site, single scanner, one session per person.
  • No dataset README, clinical variables or audiometry are shared; hearing status is a two-level group label.
  • The OpenNeuro page does not cite a paper; the link to the 2022 study rests on the shared authors and the matching group sizes.
  • Groups differ in sex ratio and age, which needs to be handled in any group comparison.
  • No derivatives such as connectivity matrices or tractograms are included.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 82 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 36 44%
  • Male 46 56%

sex in participants.tsv of OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (CC0)

Contrast / sequence

Groups can overlap

  • T1-weighted 82 100%
  • Diffusion-weighted 82 100%
  • BOLD fMRI 82 100%

sub-*/ses-01/anat, sub-*/ses-01/dwi, sub-*/ses-01/func in OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (dataset_description.json, CHANGES, file tree and JSON sidecars)

Scanner vendor

  • Siemens Healthineers 82 100%

JSON sidecars in OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (dataset_description.json, CHANGES, file tree and JSON sidecars)

Country

  • Italy 82 100%

dataset_description.json; JSON sidecars in OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (dataset_description.json, CHANGES, file tree and JSON sidecars)

Age by condition

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

Hearing impairmentHealthy control
50-591117
60-6926·
70-7912·

gp; age in participants.tsv of OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (CC0)

Age

mean 62.2, median 62, range 47 to 78

0
10
20
30
35
40-4950-5960-6970-79

age in participants.tsv of OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (CC0)

Condition

Groups can overlap

  • Hearing impairment 52 63%
    Age mean 63.7 ± 7.8
  • Healthy control 30 37%
    Age mean 59.5 ± 7.2

gp, gp; age in participants.tsv of OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (CC0)

Field strength

  • 3 T 82 100%

JSON sidecars in OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (dataset_description.json, CHANGES, file tree and JSON sidecars)

Condition by sex

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

FemaleMale
Hearing impairment1636
Healthy control2010

gp; sex in participants.tsv of OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (CC0)

Age by sex

Reported cross table. Missing cells were not published (fewer than 10 or not reported).

Female Male
  • 12
    60-69
    23
  • 13
    50-59
    15

sex; age in participants.tsv of OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (CC0)

Contrast combinations

How many subjects have exactly each set of contrasts.

T1wdwiboldSubjects with exactly this set
82

sub-*/ses-01 in OpenNeuro ds005026 snapshot 1.0.0 (dataset_description.json, CHANGES, file tree and JSON sidecars)

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
Open download

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Access page

Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal

Public domain dedication. Do anything with the data, including commercial use, without asking and without having to give credit.

dataset_description.json of snapshot 1.0.0 states "License" CC0.

Original license text Version read: 1.0 Checked 2026-10-07

What you can do

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you can share

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

What you must do

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

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Citation

Ponticorvo S, Esposito F. Hearing loss Connectome. OpenNeuro ds005026, version 1.0.0 (2024). doi:10.18112/openneuro.ds005026.v1.0.0

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.