Longitudinal amputation fMRI (ds008022)
Longitudinal functional MRI datasets of finger tapping and whole-body movement before and after upper-limb amputation
Task fMRI and T1w brain MRI of adults scanned before and up to five years after planned arm amputation, collected to test whether cortical body maps stay stable after limb loss, with longitudinal controls and chronic amputee cohorts.
Overview
Brain MRI from a University College London study that followed three adults through planned arm amputation to see whether the cortical maps of the hand and face change after limb loss. Each case was scanned twice before surgery and again about 3 and 6 months afterwards, with one further visit at 1.5 or 5 years for two of them. The OpenNeuro release pools this longitudinal study with three comparison cohorts so that the case studies can be set against typical week-to-month variability and against people who lost an arm decades earlier. Data are in BIDS under CC0.
Composition
There are 75 participants: 30 with an upper-limb amputation and 45 able-bodied controls. The longitudinal part holds the 3 amputation cases and 16 older controls scanned over a matching 6-month window. A younger control group of 11 adults, scanned twice one week apart in an earlier piano-training study, matches the youngest case. Two cross-sectional cohorts add 19 amputees with 6 controls and 8 amputees with 12 controls, one session each. Amputation levels in the participant table are mostly transradial, with some transhumeral, wrist and elbow cases. The table also lists side of amputation, handedness, phantom sensation and pain ratings and prosthesis use where collected.
Acquisition
The longitudinal study used a Siemens 3T Prisma with a 32-channel coil: a 1 mm MPRAGE T1-weighted image and multiband gradient-echo EPI at 2 mm isotropic with a repetition time of 1.5 s. Participants moved single fingers of either hand, the lips or the feet on visual cues (fingers task, four runs per session) and moved larger body parts in a body localizer (bodyloc task). Amputees attempted the movements with the phantom hand after surgery.
Known limitations
Anatomy in the two cross-sectional cohorts is already skull-stripped, so it cannot be used as raw T1-weighted input. Scanner details for the pooled cohorts are not given in the release. Group sizes in the release differ from the paper, which reports 26 chronic amputees, 18 cross-sectional controls and 22 younger controls. Sex is missing for the younger controls. Only three people were imaged before and after amputation.
Cohort
Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 75 subjects.
Sex
- Female 23 31%
- Male 41 55%
- Unknown 11 15%
sex column in participants.tsv of ds008022 snapshot 1.0.5 (CC0)
Contrast / sequence
Groups can overlap
- T1-weighted 74 99%
- BOLD fMRI 74 99%
Scanner vendor
- Siemens Healthineers 19 25%
Methods: MRI data acquisition in Schone et al. 2025, Stable cortical body maps before and after arm amputation, Nature Neuroscience
Sex by condition
Reported cross table. A dot marks a cell the source does not give.
| Healthy control | Upper limb amputation | |
|---|---|---|
| Female | 16 | · |
| Male | 18 | 23 |
| Unknown | 11 | · |
sex and group columns in participants.tsv of ds008022 snapshot 1.0.5 (CC0)
Age
mean 44.9 ± 14.4, median 49, range 18 to 69
age column in participants.tsv of ds008022 snapshot 1.0.5 (CC0)
Condition
Groups can overlap
- Healthy control 45 60%
- Upper limb amputation 30 40%
group column in participants.tsv of ds008022 snapshot 1.0.5 (CC0)
Field strength
- 3 T 19 25%
Methods: MRI data acquisition in Schone et al. 2025, Stable cortical body maps before and after arm amputation, Nature Neuroscience
Contrast combinations
How many subjects have exactly each set of contrasts.
| T1w | bold | Subjects with exactly this set |
|---|---|---|
73 | ||
1 | ||
1 |
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
Download without an account
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 1.0.5 states "License" CC0.
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
Schone HR, Maimon-Mor RO, Kollamkulam M, et al. Stable cortical body maps before and after arm amputation. Nature Neuroscience 28, 2015-2021 (2025). doi:10.1038/s41593-025-02037-7
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.
- Schone et al. 2025, Stable cortical body maps before and after arm amputation, Nature Neuroscience paper
- OpenNeuro ds008022 snapshot 1.0.5 (README, dataset_description.json, CHANGES and snapshot size) website
- participants.tsv of ds008022 snapshot 1.0.5 (CC0) computed
- BIDS file tree of ds008022 snapshot 1.0.5 (CC0), *_T1w.nii.gz and *_bold.nii.gz files under sub-*/ses-*/ computed