Data for White Matter Micro and Macrostructure Brain Charts for the Human Lifespan

Important Notes

• The data included are prior to within-dataset outlier removal to allow other researchers to use their own discretion for quality assurance
• Only data that are publicly available, or that we have gotten permission to release, are included here. For accessing data from other datasets, you will need to follow the appropriate data use agreement channels with each individal dataset maintainer.
• Researchers using this dataset should appropriately acknowledge the original contributing studies (see README.md for further details) and adhere to all applicable data use agreements.
• Data are provided strictly for research purposes, and should not be used for reidentification or any other malicious purposes.

Introduction

This Zenodo page contains derived diffusion MRI (dMRI) scalar data used to construct comprehensive white matter microstructural and macrostructural brain charts spanning the human lifespan, as described in: Michael E. Kim, et al., White matter micro and macrostructure brain charts for the human lifespan (DOI forthcoming).

Please read the included README.md file for further details on the acknowledgements for datasets and the feild_spec.csv file for the included measurements.

Dataset Information

The dataset provides quantitative features extracted from dMRI scans across 72 anatomically defined cerebral white matter pathways, enabling the creation of normative reference trajectories for brain development and aging. These reference charts establish a unified framework for benchmarking white matter maturation and degeneration, allowing researchers to compute age- and sex-adjusted centile scores, identify developmental milestones, and detect individualized structural deviations associated with neurological or psychiatric conditions.

This release includes derived scalar data and computed centile scores for 20 of the 50 independent datasets used to generate the normative charts. For the remaining datasets, sharing restrictions prevent public release of derived data through this repository. As the normative charts are cross-sectional, longitudinal data or rescans do not include centile scores and contain only tract-level microstructural and macrostructural measurements. Clinical and diagnostic information are not included in this release due to data sharing restrictions.

The data comprise 1,157 total white matter features, including:

• 509 unnormalized features (288 tract-level microstructural measures, 216 tract-level macrostructural measures, and 5 global white matter features),

• 648 normalized macrostructural features,

• Age- and sex-stratified centile scores for the above tract-specific features.

Microstructural metrics include fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), axial diffusivity (AD), and radial diffusivity (RD). Macrostructural metrics include tract volume, surface area, and average length. Macrostructural features were normalized using estimated total intracranial volume, brain volume excluding ventricles, and global white matter volume derived from FreeSurfer.

Tracts were defined using the TractSeg framework, and all shared data represent scalar measurements derived from diffusion imaging rather than raw imaging volumes.

Included Files

Included files in this release are:

• derived_data.csv: the main data table containing scalar features and centile scores

• field_spec.csv: a lookup table describing each feature column

• README.md: detailed documentation file

• HCP-YA_dua.txt: the Human Connectome Project Young Adult data use agreement

Code used for DWI preprocessing, postprocessing, and brain chart construction is publicly available via linked Zenodo repositories and a Docker image (please refer to the README for links).

Researchers using this dataset should appropriately acknowledge the original contributing studies and adhere to all applicable data use agreements. Data are provided strictly for research purposes.

For further inforamtion, please consult the README.md file.