OpenBHB: a Large-Scale Multi-Site Brain MRI Data-set for Age Prediction and Debiasing

Prediction of chronological age from neuroimaging in the healthy population is an important issue because the deviations from normal brain age may highlight abnormal trajectories towards brain disorders. As a first step, ML models have emerged to predict chronological age from brain MRI, as a proxy measure of biological age. However, there is currently no consensus w.r.t which Machine Learning (ML) model is best suited for this task, largely because of a lack of public benchmark. Furthermore, new large emerging population neuroimaging datasets are often biased by the acquisition center images are coming from. This bias heavily deteriorates models generalization capacities, especially for Deep Learning (DL) algorithms that are known to overfit rapidly on the simplest features (known as simplicity bias). Here we propose a new public benchmarking resource, namely Open Big Healthy Brains (OpenBHB), along with a challenge for both brain age prediction and site-effect removal through a representation learning framework. OpenBHB is large-scale, gathering > 5K 3D T1 brain MRI from Healthy Controls (HC) and highly multi-sites, aggregating > 60 centers worldwide and 10 studies. OpenBHB is expected to grow both in terms of available modalities and number of subjects. All OpenBHB datasets are uniformly preprocessed, including quality check, with container technologies that consist in: 3D Voxel-Based Morphometry maps (VBM from CAT12), quasi-raw (simple linear alignment of images), and Surface-Based Morphometry indices (SBM, from FreeSurfer). The OpenBHB challenge is permanent and we provide all tools, materials and tutorials for participants to easily submit and benchmark their model against each other on a public leaderboard.