General Information

The objective of The fMRI Data Center is to create an environment that will benefit the fMRI research community. The Center will achieve this ambitious goal by:

• Providing access to a common data set that everyone can use in order to develop and evaluate methods, confirm hypotheses, and perform meta-analyses.
• Increasing the number of cognitive neuroscientists who can examine, consider, analyze and assess the brain imaging data that have already been collected and published.

The ultimate goal of The fMRI Data Center is to help speed the progress and the understanding of cognitive processes and the neural substrates that underlie them by:

• Providing a publicly accessible repository of peer-reviewed fMRI studies.
• Providing all data necessary to interpret, analyze, and replicate these fMRI studies.
• Provide training for both the academic and professional communities.

The Center will create and host a Web-accessible database that will have data mining capabilities and the means to deliver requested data to the user (via Web, CD, or digital tape). Being Web-accessible implies that researchers from all fields will be able to use the data and hence contribute to the development of fMRI. This is an important point. For the first time, fMRI can easily draw on the knowledge of experts from many disciplines, such as Mathematics (e.g. image processing) and Computer Science (e.g. data mining). The Center will accept data from those researchers who are publishing fMRI imaging articles in peer-reviewed journals. The goal is to serve the entire fMRI communitity.