The Healthy Brain Network Biobank: An open resource for transdiagnostic research in pediatric mental health and learning disorders

Innovations in methods and technologies are equipping researchers with unprecedented capabilities for detecting and characterizing pathologic processes in the developing human brain. As a result, there is growing enthusiasm about the prospect of achieving clinically useful tools that can assist in the diagnosis and management of mental health and learning disorders. For these ambitions to be realized, it is critical to accrue large-scale multimodal datasets that capture a broad range of commonly encountered clinical psychopathology. To this end, the Child Mind Institute has launched the Healthy Brain Network (HBN), an ongoing initiative focused on creating and sharing a biobank comprised of data from 10,000 New York City area children and adolescents (ages 5-21). The HBN has adopted a community-referred recruitment model. Specifically, study advertisements seek the participation of families who have concerns about one or more psychiatric symptoms in their child. The HBN Biobank houses data about psychiatric, behavioral, cognitive, and lifestyle (e.g., fitness, diet) phenotypes, as well as multimodal brain imaging, electroencephalography, digital voice and video recordings, genetics, and actigraphy. In this paper, we present the motivation, rationale and design for the HBN along with the initial implementation and evolution of the HBN protocols. We describe the first major open data release (n = 664) containing descriptive, electroencephalography, and multimodal brain imaging data (resting state and naturalistic viewing functional MRI, diffusion MRI and morphometric MRI). Beyond accelerating transdiagnostic research, we discuss the potential of the HBN Biobank to advance related areas, such as biophysical modeling, voice and speech analysis, natural viewing fMRI and EEG, and methods optimization