Utah autism temporal synchrony fMRI (NDA Study 614)

This dataset is the imaging behind a University of Utah study of how long functional connections between brain regions stay in step in autism. Adolescent and adult males with autism and typically developing males from a longitudinal autism cohort, followed since 2003, had about 30 minutes of resting-state fMRI each between December 2016 and April 2018. The authors linked the 90 analysed participants in the NIMH Data Archive as NDA Study 614, drawn from the Atypical Late Neurodevelopment in Autism collections led by Janet Lainhart. The paper also replicated its lagged connectivity findings in ABIDE I and II; those data are not part of this study and are indexed separately.

Composition

The study has 90 males: 52 with autism and 38 controls. Mean age was 27.7 years (SD 8.7, range 15.3 to 57.9) in the autism group and 27.1 years (SD 7.5, range 16.3 to 46.9) in the control group. Autism diagnoses were made at entry to the longitudinal study with ADOS, ADI-R and DSM criteria, and the ADOS-2 was repeated at this visit. IQ, Social Responsiveness Scale and Trail Making Test scores were also collected; 21 participants with autism took psychoactive medication at the time of the scan.

Acquisition

Scans were done on a Siemens Prisma 3 T scanner with a 64-channel head coil. Each participant had two resting-state runs of 590 volumes (about 15.5 minutes each, opposite phase-encoding directions) with a multiband factor 4, three-echo EPI sequence at 2 mm isotropic resolution and a repetition time of 1553 ms, eyes open, with pulse and respiration recordings. The paper also reports an MP2RAGE structural scan at 1 mm; the public NDA records confirm the resting-state fMRI experiment but do not list which scan types are in the study's image files. Of 108 preprocessed participants, 18 were excluded for failed visual quality control or heavy motion.

Annotations

There are no image labels. Subjects carry a diagnostic group, age and the clinical and cognitive scores listed above.

Known limitations

Only males were studied, at a single site. Groups differed in IQ. File-level contents, formats and download size are not public. Access requires an approved NIMH Data Archive request.