Penn Medicine researchers introduce data resource to connect brain development, mental health conditions

Researchers at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine in collaboration with the Child Mind Institute have introduced a new open access brain data resource designed to aid understanding of how brain development connects to mental health conditions.

The project, titled Reproducible Brain Charts and published in Neuron, is led by Medical School psychiatry professor Theodore Satterthwaite, postdoctoral fellow Golia Shafiei, and Child Mind Institute chief science officer Michael Milham. It combines MRI data and psychiatric assessments from more than 6,000 participants across five major studies from North America, China, and Brazil.

"Neuroimaging studies of brain development have the potential to track healthy brain maturation and identify deviations linked to psychopathology," the project introduction explains. "However, large and diverse samples are necessary to detect reliable patterns of neurodevelopment and identify generalizable links to psychopathology."

The studies used different methods, making comparing findings difficult.

“To create this big data resource, we did all the painful, unsexy stuff — data organization, image processing, and quality assurance,” Satterthwaite — who is also the director of the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center — said to Penn Today. “We basically teed it up for everyone, so they just do science and run faster.”

Shafiei, a postdoctoral fellow in Satterthwaite’s lab, added that RBC solves a long-standing problem.

“Previously, it had been difficult for researchers to fully harness the available data to map brain development from childhood through young adulthood,” she said to Penn Today. “RBC serves as an important resource that future studies can build on.”

According to the RBC website, “major mental illnesses are increasingly understood as disorders of brain development,” and the platform is meant to track typical brain development and variations that are connected to mental health symptoms. It goes on to explain that every element of RBC is open and reproducible, including “image curation, image processing, and all analyses.” 

This transparency allows researchers worldwide to build on this work quickly.

The team worked with several other institutions including Columbia University, Universidade de São Paulo, and Beijing Normal University. 

“RBC serves as an important resource that future studies can build on,” Shafiei said. “We already see it accelerating research—the data has been downloaded nearly 4,000 times even though it just came out.”

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