TY  - JOUR
AU  - Koch, Alexandra
AU  - Stirnberg, Rüdiger
AU  - Estrada, Santiago
AU  - Zeng, Weiyi
AU  - Lohner, Valerie
AU  - Shahid, Mohammad
AU  - Ehses, Philipp
AU  - Pracht, Eberhard D
AU  - Reuter, Martin
AU  - Stöcker, Tony
AU  - Breteler, Monique M B
TI  - Versatile MRI acquisition and processing protocol for population-based neuroimaging.
JO  - Nature protocols
VL  - 20
IS  - 5
SN  - 1754-2189
CY  - Basingstoke
PB  - Nature Publishing Group
M1  - DZNE-2025-00605
SP  - 1223 - 1245
PY  - 2025
AB  - Neuroimaging has an essential role in studies of brain health and of cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, requiring the availability of versatile magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) acquisition and processing protocols. We designed and developed a multipurpose high-resolution MRI protocol for large-scale and long-term population neuroimaging studies that includes structural, diffusion-weighted and functional MRI modalities. This modular protocol takes almost 1 h of scan time and is, apart from a concluding abdominal scan, entirely dedicated to the brain. The protocol links the acquisition of an extensive set of MRI contrasts directly to the corresponding fully automated data processing pipelines and to the required quality assurance of the MRI data and of the image-derived phenotypes. Since its successful implementation in the population-based Rhineland Study (ongoing, currently more than 11,000 participants, target participant number of 20,000), the proposed MRI protocol has proved suitable for epidemiological and clinical cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, including multisite studies. The approach requires expertise in magnetic resonance image acquisition, in computer science for the data management and the execution of processing pipelines, and in brain anatomy for the quality assessment of the MRI data. The protocol takes  1 h of MRI acquisition and  20 h of data processing to complete for a single dataset, but parallelization over multiple datasets using high-performance computing resources reduces the processing time. By making the protocol, MRI sequences and pipelines available, we aim to contribute to better comparability, interoperability and reusability of large-scale neuroimaging data.
KW  - Humans
KW  - Magnetic Resonance Imaging: methods
KW  - Neuroimaging: methods
KW  - Image Processing, Computer-Assisted: methods
KW  - Brain: diagnostic imaging
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:39672917
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41596-024-01085-w
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/278572
ER  -