OpenPain: Brain network change Mano

This OpenPain Project study holds brain MRI from adults with chronic low back pain and from matched pain-free controls, collected at two sites to study how large-scale brain networks change in chronic pain. Mano and colleagues used the data as the discovery cohort for support vector machine and deep learning classifiers of patients versus controls, and for graph-theory analyses of hub disruption and modular reorganisation. The paper's data availability statement points to the OpenPain Project for the raw data, which it distributes after online registration.

Composition

The cohort has 97 people: 41 patients and 56 controls. The Cambridge (UK) site contributed 17 patients and 17 controls, the Osaka (Japan) site 24 patients and 39 controls. Ages per group span 20 to 68 years. Patients had back pain for more than six months, no other chronic pain condition and no major neurological or psychiatric illness. Controls were matched approximately for age, sex and IQ. Each participant has a T1-weighted structural scan and one resting-state fMRI run. Pain intensity (visual analogue scale, short-form McGill questionnaire), depression scores (Beck, Hamilton) and a reading-based IQ estimate were collected.

Acquisition

Both sites used a Siemens 3T Magnetom Trio with a 12-channel head coil, at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge and at CiNet in Osaka. Resting-state BOLD was a gradient echo EPI with a 64 x 64 matrix: TR 2000 ms and 300 volumes in Cambridge, TR 2500 ms and 234 volumes in Osaka. The structural scan was a 1 mm MPRAGE, with 176 sagittal slices in Cambridge and 208 in Osaka. Cambridge scanned from June 2013 to April 2014, Osaka from April 2014 to March 2015.

Known limitations

The sample is small and the two sites differ in fMRI timing and slice coverage. One Cambridge patient was excluded from the published analyses for excessive signal changes after motion scrubbing. The paper reports no sex breakdown. Preprocessed connectivity matrices from the same study are held separately by ATR in Japan under their own terms. The OpenPain download portal is behind registration, so the file contents on the portal were not checked for this entry.