POND Imaging Data

POND is an Ontario research network, funded by the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) as an Integrated Discovery Program, that studies the biology of neurodevelopmental disorders across diagnostic boundaries. The imaging release on OBI's Brain-CODE platform bundles the brain scans of POND participants with their demographic, medical history, behavioural and cognitive data, for research on what autism, ADHD, OCD and related conditions share and where they differ.

Composition

Version 1.0 of the release covers 682 children and youth seen at a single timepoint. The cohort mixes typically developing participants with children diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, Tourette syndrome, Fragile X syndrome and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. The release holds 179 files with a total size of 303 GB, as NIfTI images, MEG recordings and CSV, PDF, TXT and RDA tables. A separate POND registry release with clinical data for 2,784 participants and no imaging is also on Brain-CODE and is not part of this entry.

Acquisition

The release lists T1-weighted and T2-weighted structural MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, MR spectroscopy (including a series labelled GABA-ACC), a gradient echo series, resting-state and task fMRI, and MEG. The fMRI tasks cover emotional face processing, theory of mind and a stop signal task; the MEG tasks include set-shifting, go/no-go, social attribution and an Inscape task. A POND paper reports that its MRI was acquired on one 3T Siemens scanner at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, first a Tim Trio and later a Prisma Fit, while participants were recruited at several Ontario hospitals and universities.

Annotations

There are no image labels. Diagnoses come from the clinical assessments of the network.

Known limitations

• Counts per diagnosis, age, sex and contrast for the imaging release are not published.
• MEG is part of the release but has no modality term in this index, and MRS is not listed as a contrast.
• The scanner upgrade from Trio to Prisma changes resolution within the cohort.
• Data are reached only through an approved data access request, and analysis normally stays inside a Brain-CODE workspace; local download needs a separate transfer agreement.