The Imaging of Brain Anomalies in Super Heroes (I-BASH) study

Motivation

With the substantial increase in the rise of genetically and environmentally enhanced humans with altruistic tendencies (known colloquially as “super heroes”), there is an urgent need to identify and characterise physiological differences between this group and the normal non-super population, in order to better identify these individuals at an early stage before the onset of their powers.

When identified at this stage, they are more likely to receive proper training and guidance so as to fine tune their powers. Biomarkers, and specifically those derived from imaging modalities, have shown great promise in identifying subtle early changes in this population. In particular brain imaging techniques can show if certain areas of the brain are increased in size, which might help explain such phenomenon as extraordinarily fast reaction times, telepathy, and rapid healing.

The Imaging of Brain Anomalies in Super Heroes study, or I-BASH, is a multicentre cohort of individuals with these powers as well as close family members or siblings without enhancement, who serve as a natural control group. Additional substudies will look at various physiological phenotyping of physical attributes, as well as a separate arm looking at differences between these groups and an enhanced group with sociopathic tendencies (otherwise known as “super villains”), but at the moment recruitment for this arm tends to be quite low.

One particular issue is with regards to the sensitive nature of these individuals participating in this study. Many individuals use a public persona in order to protect their actual identity and the identity of their family members. If this protected health information were to be released, such that their participation in this study was linked to their actual identity, this could put these individuals and family members at incredible risk.

As a result, proper control of protected health information (PHI) is incredibly important for this study. One particularly thorny data protection issue is that the high resolution MRI data can allow three-dimensional rendering of superheroes without their masks on, thus potentially allowing identification of these individuals from the publicly available release of these databases. Thus stripping away facial information from these images would be a worthwhile step to protect participants’ identity.

However, these algorithms often can have an impact on the subsequent analysis methods that are used to obtain imaging biomarkers. Understanding if there is a substantial change in the data as a result of enhanced de-identification processes is critical.

Methods Imaging

All individuals gave informed consent and underwent an imaging study on a 3T scanner at their local site. Individuals with contraindications to MRI (including adamantium-laced skeletons) were excluded from this study. The acquisition protocol consists of a volumetric T1-weighted scan, volumetric T2-weighted scans, diffusion weighted imaging, resting state fMRI, and arterial spin labelling.

Project Remit

A small amount of pilot data was acquired from the three key sites (Metropolis General Hospital, Avengers HQ Medical Centre, and Professor Charles Xavier School for the Gifted).

Your objective is to do the following:

  1. Ensure that the DICOM metadata is properly de-identified before archiving into the I-BASH XNAT database
  2. Setup automation so that conversion of DICOM to Nifti and FastSurfer, a deep learning implementation of FreeSurfer, is run on the T1 scans upon archiving.
  3. Setup defacing algorithm and determine if there is any effect on FastSurfer results before and after defacing.
  4. If time - test a different defacing algorithm to compare the ability to preserve the results.