One of the problems that has dazzled scientists and researchers for as long as man has lived is understanding the brain. The human brain is an incredibly complex structure that acts as the control center for your body. Everything else in the body, from the nervous system to your organs, receive signals from the brain thousands of times per day. The brain is also a critical point of failure that we know can cause a host of ailments from Alzheimer’s to Parkinson’s to epilepsy. Understanding the brain in its entirety has the potential to cure diseases that we never thought possible.
In the past decades, the impediment to understanding the brain has been computational resources and a lack of data. Limitations in technology meant that the scope of data that could be collected was narrowed. Additionally, the type of data they could collect was also limited. However, technological advancement in the last 20 years has allowed scientists to collect a breadth of data. While there is still difficulty aggregating this vast amount of data within the neuroscience community, this data may very well hold the keys to understanding the human brain.
We are continuing our dataset series by taking a look at some aggregators of neuroscience datasets. These sites each offer a diverse collection of datasets and I will discuss exactly what you can expect to find. Check out our last post if you’re looking for MedTech Datasets and ideas for your next healthcare hackathon, or view the entire datasets series here.
Now, lets get into our list of 5 places to find powerful datasets for neuroscience research of all kinds!
Places to find Neuroscience Datasets
Brain Catalogue: This website has complete scans of the brains of various vertebrates including monkeys, lions, dolphins and even humans! The datasets consist of images of the brain split into discrete slices. With over 30 animals represented, the Brain Catalogue is a phenomenal open source resource for neuroscientists.
Allen Brain Map: Created by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, this site offers not only a breadth of datasets, but also tools for visualizing neurological data. This site has great datasets including gene expression for 1.1 million cells of a mouse brain, as well as atlases for other structures such as the human brain or the spinal cord of a mouse.
CRCNS: Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) is a dataset sharing platform that also has discussion features. Their datasets are intuitively grouped by section of the brain such as somatosensory cortex, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. There are 20 such sections, each full of datasets. They even have a challenge section with datasets designed for predicting neuron responses.
Human Connectome: This website has datasets related to the Connectome Coordination Facility’s goal of mapping the human brain and connecting its structure to function and behavior. The CCF conducts and supports experiments and releases their datasets publicly.
OASIS Brains: Open Access Series of Imaging Studies is a collection of three dataset releases containing neuroimaging data from studies conducted by Knight ADRC. The data in these releases compares MRI imaging in Nondemented and Demented and could be used to train a classifier that predicts whether a patient has Alzheimer’s.
