The original Human Connectome Project focused on gathering data from healthy young adults, aged 21-35, to build a high-quality dataset for comparability with other populations. As a natural extension of that work, a number of studies have been funded to gather data on healthy humans of other ages, ranging from birth to nonagenarians and beyond.
The CCF will directly support multiple Lifespan studies, and offer indirect support to others via the dissemination of HCP-style protocols:
27 Subjects, Dec 2013 – Feb 2015
Based on the encouraging early success of the Human Connectome Project, the NIH in the fall of 2013 awarded supplements to explore the feasibility of extending the HCP methods to examine brain circuits across the human lifespan. The data being generated as part of the HCP are extremely high quality, and include anatomical, diffusion and both resting state and task based functional MRI. However, the HCP acquisition protocol for the imaging data alone is 4+ hours. This has proven to be routinely feasible for healthy young adults, but it is problematic for children, older adults and other special populations to cope with scan sessions of that duration. Thus, a major goal of the HCP Lifespan Pilot supplement has been to develop and evaluate a shorter protocol that is tolerable and realistic across the human lifespan, while still providing HCP-style data of as high a quality as possible.