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

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 20 participants each scanned on six different 3 T 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 the 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.