Open access databases in molecular imaging (or how to access more than 30.000 PET scans!)

COEX 

Notwithstanding an increasing interest in integrating molecular information into brain mapping studies, the literature based on molecular imaging remains relatively limited. One reason is a relative scarcity of available molecular imaging data. Ionizing radiation and high costs limit its applicability, especially, in healthy subjects. At present, however, a growing adherence to open science practices is making more and more molecular imaging data available to the broader neuroscientific community.
In the first part of the talk, I will give an overview of openly or easily accessible molecular imaging datasets. I will explain how to find and access more than 60 datasets including brain molecular imaging data (either cross-sectional, longitudinal or multimodal) of more than 30,000 subjects. Data are available for a broad range of biological targets (metabolism, neurotransmission, pathology), in healthy subjects of all ages and patients with >20 different clinical conditions. Most datasets are multimodal with 85% of datasets also including magnetic resonance (MR) data in the same subjects. In the second part of the talk, I will give practical examples on how to access these datasets, how to practically deal with different data formats (dicom, ecat, nifti), data acquisition types (static, dynamic) and level of processing of the data (raw, pre-processed, quantified). At the end of the talk, the attendees will have obtained essential knowledge on how to identify, access, download and correctly manage molecular imaging data from the major available datasets.