Massive database maps links between brain development and mental health

A new large-scale, open data resource from the Perelman School of Medicine and collaborators helps researchers link brain development with mental health disorders.

Mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and ADHD affect millions worldwide and contribute significantly to the global burden of disease—impacting individuals’ health and daily lives and placing a substantial strain on social systems and national and global economies.

These conditions often involve differences in brain development, particularly during childhood and adolescence. However, tracking these brain changes in relation to psychopathology—the study of mental health disorders—has been limited by the need for large, diverse neuroimaging datasets.

Now, a collaborative team led by Theodore D. Satterthwaite and Golia Shafiei of the Perelman School of Medicine and Michael P. Milham of the Child Mind Institute introduces Reproducible Brain Charts (RBC), a large-scale, open data resource for mapping brain development and its associations with mental health. Their resource is published in Neuron.

“To create this big data resource, we did all the painful, unsexy stuff—data organization, image processing, and quality assurance,” says Satterthwaite, the McLure II Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Research in the Department of Psychiatry and the director of the Penn Lifespan Informatics and Neuroimaging Center (PennLINC).

RBC integrates data from five large studies of brain development in children and young adults across three continents and “harmonizes” the different mental health assessment tools they used. Satterthwaite notes that this type of task is labor intensive and requires computing power that is beyond the scope of the resources of most scientists. “We basically teed it up for everyone, so they just do science and run faster.”

“The resource includes over 6,000 participants’ brain MRIs,” says Shafiei, a postdoctoral fellow in the Satterthwaite lab. Previously, she says, it had been difficult for researchers to fully harness the available data to map brain development from childhood through young adulthood—the challenge being that the brain scans from the studies are released and processed differently, making them hard to integrate.

Taking a similar approach with the mental health assessments, they harmonized the data for psychiatric symptoms, says Satterthwaite. The RBC includes data for “major symptom domains for each of the kids for whom we have measures of brain structure and brain function,” he says. This will allow researchers to better understand how the brain develops normally and how variation in mental health symptoms is linked to variation in brain development, he adds.

“We just all put it together in one convenient place, accompanied by a website with simple instructions on how to get the data,” says Satterthwaite. “This resource makes it really easy to look at brain development using massive samples of easy-to-use, de-identified data.”

Beyond providing a large new open data resource for the community, RBC also offers a transparent and reproducible workflow for large-scale data integration and sharing and may serve as a model for future multistudy efforts that others can adopt or adapt.

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