A multi-site, multi-modal travelling-heads resource for brain MRI harmonisation

Warrington, Shaun; Torchi, Andrea; Mougin, Olivier; Campbell, Jon; Ntata, Asante; Craig, Martin; Assimopoulos, Stephania; Alfaro-Almagro, Fidel; Miller, Karla; Jenkinson, Mark; Morgan, Paul S; Sotiropoulos, Stamatios N

Abstract

Despite its great potential for studying the living brain, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be often limited by nuisance non-biological factors, such as hardware/software differences between scanners, which can interfere with biological variability. This lack of standardisation or harmonisation between scanners hinders reproducibility and quantifiability of MRI. Towards addressing this challenge, we present one of the most comprehensive MRI harmonisation resources, based on a travelling heads paradigm; healthy volunteers scanned repeatedly across different scanners. The Oxford-Nottingham Harmonisation (ON-Harmony) resource offers data from participants each scanned on six different 3T MRI scanners from three major vendors (GE/Philips/Siemens) across five imaging sites. Each scanning session includes five imaging modalities (T1w/T2w/dMRI/rfMRI/SWI) with protocols aligned to UK Biobank, while for about half of the participants five within-scanner repeats are additionally acquired. The 165 multi-modal scanning sessions allow mapping of different pools of variability (biological, between-scanner, within-scanner) for hundreds of MRI-derived measures. We describe the breadth of information contained in the publicly-available data and showcase their reuse potential for evaluating efficacy of harmonisation approaches.

Citation

Warrington, S., Torchi, A., Mougin, O., Campbell, J., Ntata, A., Craig, M., Assimopoulos, S., Alfaro-Almagro, F., Miller, K., Jenkinson, M., Morgan, P. S., & Sotiropoulos, S. N. (2025). A multi-site, multi-modal travelling-heads resource for brain MRI harmonisation. Scientific Data, 12, Article 609. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04822-2

• Journal Article Type: Data Article / Data Paper
• Acceptance Date: Mar 13, 2025
• Online Publication Date: Apr 11, 2025
• Publication Date: Apr 11, 2025
• Deposit Date: Mar 14, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 15, 2025
• Journal: Scientific Data
• Electronic ISSN: 2052-4463
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 12
• Article Number: 609
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04822-2
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/46468278
• Publisher URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04822-2