TL;DR

The future of neuropsychology, i.e. brain lesions-symptom mapping, will be transdiagnostic, open, and FAIR: we set out to provide the field with an open source platform fostering storage, sharing, synthesis and meta-analysis of clinical data.

Project Idea

This is something we’ve all been thinking about for a while:

Modern neuroimaging has embraced the benefits of Open Science thanks to the development of tools such as Neurosynth (https://neurosynth.org/), Neurovault (https://neurovault.org/), and Neuroquery (https://neuroquery.org/), and the adoption of the key principles and standards, such as the Brain Imaging Data Structure specification (BIDS, https://bids.neuroimaging.io/) and the FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable initiative (https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618). However, functional neuroimaging data can only provide correlational evidence of the link between specific behavioral and cognitive features and brain structures. On the contrary, patients' data enables causal inference, highlighting critical neural substrates. Thus, neuropsychology has been and will always be a privileged window into the inner workings of the brain. Unfortunately, the adoption of Open Science practices in clinical settings is hampered by several technical, economic, and political obstacles (see section on challenges). As a result, open platforms enabling access to and sharing clinical (meta)data are scarce (one notable exception: Enigma, https://enigma-toolbox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html). We set out to solve this issue by creating an online, free platform allowing access, sharing, and synthesis of neurological and neuropsychological (meta)data.

Our Goal

We aim to build an online platform and community that allows open sharing, storage, and synthesis of clinical (meta)data, crucial for the development of modern, transdiagnostic, FAIR neuropsychology. First, published peer-reviewed papers will be scrapped to collect already available (meta)data. Second, our platform will allow direct uploading of clinical brain maps and their corresponding metadata. A basic automated preprocessing and data-quality check pipeline will be implemented. Key data will be automatically extracted, synthesized, and made available alongside the one directly uploaded. All the available demographic, behavioral, clinical, and cognitive data will be properly organized and mapped onto the neural data to allow statistical analysis (i.e., data-driven lesion-symptom mapping). Ultimately, probabilistic maps synthesizing transdiagnostic information on lesion-symptom mapping would be constantly updated as more data are gathered. To this end, data visualization will be critical (e.g. http://speechbrainviewer.com/). Overall, the platform will (1) enable sharing of FAIR neuropsychological datasets across research centres and groups; (2) foster understanding of the topographical distribution and morphological characteristics of brain lesions; (3) allow large-scale, data-driven exploration of the associations between behavior and cognitive symptoms and brain regions.