It has been a long time since I planed to share the imaging data of my own brain. The idea is inspired by Poldrack’s MyConnectome project. As a neuroscientist, we usually scan our own brains. Although each single dataset is much smaller (compared to MyConnetome), many a little make a mickle. If these datasets are collected and shared, it would be a unique resource for better understanding of human brain, in particular of the neuroscientists’ brain and their academic life (as well as many other individual differences).

After a few weeks of procrastination, I finally completed the data sharing of my own brain’s imaging data on FigShare, including structural and functional MRI scans. Here I used a newly-proposed data structure for brain imaging data, that is the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) was used.

My brain with several lateralized function terms

Besides Poldrack’s MyConnectome and mine, I found that there is another identifiable brain which is from Chris Gorgolewski. Chris has shared his own brain scans, including T1, T2, T2* and FLAIR data from a 3T scanner. You can download them here.

With these, I think it would be interesting to propose a project to collect and share the identifiable brains of neuroscientists. We can term this project as Personally Identifiable Brains (PIB). I will list some potential applications in my mind of the dataset in my next blog. This is just an initial idea, and any suggestion and support would be appreciated for this project.

Finally, should you find any health-relevant findings, please contact me (Xiangzhen Kong) before publicly releasing those results.