Penn-CHOP Developmental Connectome

The Penn-CHOP Developmental Connectome is a small neonatal brain MRI release from the Laboratory of Neural MRI and Brain Connectivity led by Hao Huang at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania. It provides diffusion and resting-state functional MRI of newborn brains for research on early structural and functional brain development. The lab hosts it on brainmrimap.org next to its neonate, infant and macaque atlases.

Composition

A 2018 version of the dataset page said the release holds data from 23 healthy term-born neonates. The current page gives no subject count, so it is not known whether the release has changed since. The diffusion part consists of DTI-derived maps, not raw diffusion-weighted images. The current page also lists T1-weighted images with the same matrix as the DTI data. No demographic table is published for the released subjects.

Acquisition

Diffusion data were acquired at 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.6 mm with two averages and zero-padded to a 256 x 256 x 60 matrix (0.6563 x 0.6563 x 1.6 mm). Resting-state fMRI was acquired at 2.4 x 2.4 x 3 mm and zero-padded to 128 x 128 x 30 (1.3125 x 1.3125 x 3 mm). The lab's papers listed on the page describe this neonatal cohort: infants recruited at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and scanned during natural sleep, without sedation, on a 3T Philips Achieva at Children's Medical Center Dallas. Cao et al. (2017) report a rs-fMRI run of 210 volumes over 5.4 minutes with TR 1500 ms.

Known limitations

The release has no data descriptor. Sex, exact postmenstrual age at scan and file format of the released subjects are not stated on any public page. The papers analyse larger preterm and term cohorts from the same project (for example 76 neonates in Ouyang et al. 2019), but only the 23 term-born neonates are described as part of the release. Access requires filling in a form, and the terms limit use to research.