Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC)

The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) studies how brain development relates to cognition and to emerging psychiatric symptoms in youth, and how genetics shapes both. It was run as a two-year NIMH-funded collaboration between the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, which recruited from its pool of previously genotyped children. Imaging, genotype and phenotype data are shared jointly through dbGaP under the original project name "Neurodevelopmental Genomics: Trajectories of Complex Phenotypes" (phs000607).

Composition

The dbGaP study lists 9,496 consented subjects aged 8 to 21 with genotypes, a structured psychiatric interview (GOASSESS), medical history and a computerized neurocognitive battery. The 2015 data paper describes 9,498 such subjects and an imaging subsample of 1,000, the first participants scanned, released as raw DICOM without quality control. By sequence, 1,000 have the T1-weighted MPRAGE, 942 pseudo-continuous ASL, 885 diffusion, 934 the emotion identification fMRI task, 913 the fractal n-back task and 883 resting-state fMRI. The dbGaP page states that the second release added phenotype, genotype and image data for over 500 more subjects and that the current release holds over 9,700 MRI images, but gives no updated imaging subject count. Participants come from a community sample, not a case-control design; psychopathology is measured dimensionally.

Acquisition

All imaging took place at Penn on one Siemens TIM Trio 3T scanner with fixed software, in a fixed sequence order lasting about 50 minutes. Diffusion used 64 directions split into two runs. Perfusion used a custom spin-echo pCASL sequence. Image headers carry age in months, sex and self-reported race.

Annotations

No image labels. Each subject has clinical, cognitive and genotype data, plus in-scanner task logs.

Known limitations

Imaging excluded youth with major medical or neurological conditions, but later review found a small share with relevant history or incidental findings. Later scans in the protocol have fewer subjects because some sessions ended early. The authors report a fat-related artifact in the pCASL perfusion images. Access requires an approved dbGaP request, and the consent group limits use to not-for-profit organizations and genotype-phenotype research.