NiCK Study

The NiCK Study (Neurocognitive Assessment and Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis of Children and Young Adults with Chronic Kidney Disease) is a cross-sectional cohort from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania. It pairs a non-contrast multimodal brain MRI with traditional and computerized neurocognitive testing and clinical phenotyping, including 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure, to study how reduced kidney function, anemia and hypertension relate to brain structure, perfusion and connectivity. CHOP released the de-identified research data on Harvard Dataverse in 2025.

Composition

The dataset page describes 90 participants aged 8 to 25 with CKD stages 2 to 5, including patients on dialysis and after kidney transplant, and 70 controls matched on age and socioeconomic status. Some CKD participants with a marked change in kidney function, and a group with stable function, were scanned again at least six months later; files with a _2 or _2C suffix mark these second visits. Published analyses used 85 CKD and 63 control participants for structural MRI and 73 CKD and 57 control participants for arterial spin labeling. The deposit also holds a de-identified REDCap export of clinical and neurocognitive data with its data dictionary, medication lists and a scanner configuration file.

Acquisition

All scans were acquired without sedation on a 3T Siemens Verio with a 32-channel head coil between 2011 and 2014. The protocol paper lists 3D T1 MPRAGE, T1 FLASH, T2 FLAIR, proton density/T2, diffusion tensor imaging (30 directions, b = 1000), a GRE field map, resting-state BOLD fMRI and pseudocontinuous ASL. Images are shared as one DICOM archive per participant encounter with identifiers removed from the headers. Pulse oximetry recorded by the scanner's physiological monitoring unit during the scan is shared as separate files.

Known limitations

The dataset page does not state which sequences each archive contains, so per-contrast counts here come from the analysed samples of the two imaging papers and are lower bounds. The cohort is from a single center. Use is limited to non-profit research under a revocable CHOP license, copies may not be passed on, and the data must be destroyed after use.