Baby Open Brains: An open-source dataset of infant brain segmentations

Reproducibility of neuroimaging research on infant brain development remains limited due to highly variable processing approaches. Progress towards reproducible pipelines is limited by a lack of benchmarks such as gold-standard brain segmentations. These segmentations are limited by the difficulty of infant brain segmentations, which require extensive neuroanatomical knowledge and are time-consuming in nature. Addressing this, we constructed the Baby Open Brains (BOBs) Dataset, an open source resource of manually curated and expert reviewed infant brain segmentations. Anatomical MRI data was segmented from 71 infant imaging visits across 51 participants, using both T1w and T2w images per visit. Images showed dramatic differences in myelination and intensities across 1–9 months, emphasizing the need for densely sampled gold-standard segmentations across early life. This dataset provides a benchmark for evaluating and improving pipelines dependent upon segmentations in the youngest populations. As such, this dataset provides a vitally needed foundation for early-life large-scale studies such as HBCD.