UK Biobank Brain Imaging Protocol

The UK Biobank is an effort led to collect diverse phenotypic data to promote population-level assessments of lifestyle, environment, and genetics on biology and health presentation. A subset of subjects enrolled in the study participated in brain imaging, from which the first imaging session’s data were retrieved (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk)^{37 (link),38 (link)}.
Scanner acquisition of brain structural MRI is detailed elsewhere (https://biobank.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/crystal/crystal/docs/brain_mri.pdf). In brief, all three scanning sites used standard Siemens Skyra 3T scanners with a Siemens 32-channel RF receive head coil. T1 and T2-FLAIR acquisitions were both downloaded to support gray and white matter tissue segmentation. T1 acquisition involved a five-minute 3D MPRAGE session at 1×1×1 mm resolution, in-plane acceleration iPAT=2, and prescan-normalization. T2-FLAIR acquisition involved a six-minute 3D SPACE session at 1.05×1×1 mm resolution, in-plane acceleration iPAT=2, partial Fourier = 7/8, fat saturation, elliptical k-space scanning, and pre-scan normalization^{78 (link)}.