Skip to content
Open Imaging Index
MRI Brain

SLIM

Southwest University Longitudinal Imaging Multimodal Brain Data Repository

Repeated brain MRI of healthy undergraduates over about three and a half years, a resource for test-retest reliability and brain change in early adulthood. 594 Chinese students with structural, resting-state and diffusion scans, plus behavioral measures.

Go to dataset Edit Report

Overview

The Southwest University Longitudinal Imaging Multimodal (SLIM) repository follows healthy Chinese undergraduates with repeated brain MRI over roughly three and a half years. Jiang Qiu's group at the Brain Imaging Center of Southwest University in Chongqing collected it between November 2011 and January 2015 and released it through the International Neuroimaging Data-sharing Initiative (INDI) with a Scientific Data descriptor in 2017. Its narrow age range and long retest interval make it a resource for test-retest reliability and for tracking brain change in early adulthood.

Composition

The phenotype files list 594 participants and 1,048 sessions: 580 at the first time point, 240 at the second and 228 at the third. 121 participants have all three sessions. At the first scan the mean age was 20.1 years (range 17 to 27). Each session holds a T1-weighted image, a resting-state fMRI run and a diffusion scan, with a few sessions missing one of the latter two. Released behavioral measures include depression and anxiety inventories. QA metrics from the Preprocessed Connectomes Project protocol and parcellated connectivity matrices (Dosenbach 160 and Shen 268 atlases) are also provided.

Acquisition

All sessions used one 3 T Siemens Trio. The MPRAGE has 176 slices of 1 mm isotropic voxels, TR 1900 ms, TE 2.52 ms and TI 900 ms. The eight-minute eyes-closed resting-state run has 242 EPI volumes of 32 slices, TR 2000 ms, TE 30 ms and 3.4 x 3.4 x 3 mm voxels with a 1 mm gap. Diffusion was a spin-echo EPI at 2 mm isotropic with 30 directions at b = 1000 s/mm², repeated three times for 93 volumes in total. Faces were removed from the anatomical images.

Annotations

There are no image labels. Phenotypes cover age, sex, scan dates and questionnaire scores.

Known limitations

  • Single site and single scanner, and a narrow age range of university students.
  • The paper's counts per number of sessions add up to 595 participants, while the phenotype files list 594.
  • Fourteen participants have no first-time-point session, so their age is not given.
  • Task fMRI was acquired for some participants but is not released, and only part of the behavioral battery is shared.
  • Images were released regardless of quality; users apply their own exclusions.
  • Some sessions of the first two time points were shared earlier as part of CoRR.

Cohort

Aggregate numbers from the sources below. Bars are relative to the 594 subjects.

Sex

  • Female 330 56%
  • Male 264 44%

column Sex in Phenotype files swu_slim_phenodata_time1.tsv, swu_slim_phenodata_time2.tsv and swu_slim_phenodata_time3.tsv (CC BY-NC per the release page) in the public SLIM folder of the fcp-indi S3 bucket

Contrast / sequence

Groups can overlap

  • T1-weighted 594 100%
  • Diffusion-weighted 594 100%
  • BOLD fMRI 592 100%

column anat, column func, column DTI in Phenotype files swu_slim_phenodata_time1.tsv, swu_slim_phenodata_time2.tsv and swu_slim_phenodata_time3.tsv (CC BY-NC per the release page) in the public SLIM folder of the fcp-indi S3 bucket

Age

mean 20.1 ± 1.3, median 20, range 17 to 27

0
100
200
300
391
10-1920-29

swu_slim_phenodata_time1.tsv column age_at_Scan1 in Phenotype files swu_slim_phenodata_time1.tsv, swu_slim_phenodata_time2.tsv and swu_slim_phenodata_time3.tsv (CC BY-NC per the release page) in the public SLIM folder of the fcp-indi S3 bucket; Methods: Overall design in Liu et al. 2017, Longitudinal test-retest neuroimaging data from healthy young adults in southwest China, Scientific Data

Age by sex

Reported cross table. Missing cells were not published (fewer than 10 or not reported).

Female Male
  • 201
    20-29
    190
  • 122
    10-19
    67

swu_slim_phenodata_time1.tsv columns Sex and age_at_Scan1 in Phenotype files swu_slim_phenodata_time1.tsv, swu_slim_phenodata_time2.tsv and swu_slim_phenodata_time3.tsv (CC BY-NC per the release page) in the public SLIM folder of the fcp-indi S3 bucket

Contrast combinations

Studies

How many studies have exactly each set of contrasts.

T1wdwiboldSubjects with exactly this set
1,026
19
3

columns anat, func and DTI in Phenotype files swu_slim_phenodata_time1.tsv, swu_slim_phenodata_time2.tsv and swu_slim_phenodata_time3.tsv (CC BY-NC per the release page) in the public SLIM folder of the fcp-indi S3 bucket

License and access

Our reading of the license, not legal advice. Before you use the data, read the original license and confirm that your use is allowed. We take no responsibility for how you use a dataset. Full disclaimer

Access
Open download

Download without an account

Access page

1000 Functional Connectomes Project / INDI terms (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, no version stated)

Non-commercial use only, after registering with the 1000 Functional Connectomes Project on NITRC. The NITRC project lists a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license without a version: derived works must credit the source and stay non-commercial but need not use the same license.

The release page states "Creative Commons License: Attribution - Non-Commercial" as its usage agreement, and the data descriptor names CC-BY-NC as the data license. The images and phenotype files download from the public fcp-indi S3 bucket without an account. The data descriptor asks users to cite it and acknowledge the original authors and lab.

Original license text Version read: License field "Attribution Non-Commercial" on the NITRC fcon_1000 project page (no Creative Commons version named) and the access statement on the INDI home page, read 2026-10-08 Checked 2026-10-08

What you can do

  • No
  • Not stated
  • Not stated
  • Conditional
  • Not stated

What you can share

  • Not stated
  • Conditional
  • Share trained models Not stated

What you must do

  • Yes
  • No
  • Conditional
  • Ethics approval No
  • Manuscript review No
  • Release code No
  • Return results No
  • Delete after use No

Limits

  • No
  • Location limits No

Commercial license: Not stated

Citation

Liu W, Wei D, Chen Q, Yang W, Meng J, Wu G, Bi T, Zhang Q, Zuo XN, Qiu J. Longitudinal test-retest neuroimaging data from healthy young adults in southwest China. Scientific Data 4, 170017 (2017). doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.17

Sources

Every number on this page comes from one of these documents. Each chart names the table or page it is taken from. The raw numbers are in stats.csv.