UK Biobank Brain Imaging - Online Resources


This page contains a number of online resources provided in addition to the centrally-managed UK Biobank showcase and database. No subject-specific or otherwise sensitive materials are found here.


Acquisition and Analysis Documentation

Primary brain imaging documentation (this includes details of different data releases).

Acquisition: material relating to setting up and running the UK Biobank brain imaging protocol.

Analysis: material relating to the central image processing pipeline.

Genetics: Oxford Brain Imaging Genetics (BIG40) interactive web server (with SNPxIDP summary statistic downloads). Also, GWAS summary statistic resources for QSM/T2*, white matter lesions and task-fMRI.


UKB Brain Imaging "Core" Papers


Other FMRIB/WIN papers using UKB brain imaging data:


Average templates and other image resources

Below are links for web-based visualisation of several group-averaged templates from the UK Biobank brain imaging.
All of these group-average resources are released openly under the CC BY 4.0 licence.
You can also download all of these group-average NIFTI-format templates in a single zipfile.

Multiple structural and task-fMRI group-average images

T1, T2 FLAIR, Diffusion MRI and Task fMRI data from more than 4000 UK Biobank participants were combined to carry out large-scale population-average mapping of structure, structural connectivity and functional activation. View these group-averaged spatial maps here (may take a few minutes to fully load).

White matter tract orientations

Separately, there are several views of the principal, secondary and tertiary fibre orientations from both DTI and probabilistic fibre modellings

Resting-state networks

25-component group-ICA:       3D-maps browser    -    connectome browser    -    network edges 3D browser (browsers except Safari)   -    list of network edges
100-component group-ICA:     3D-maps browser    -    connectome browser    -    network edges 3D browser (browsers except Safari)   -    list of network edges

The 3D-maps may take a few minutes to fully load. The estimation of these networks is now briefly described:

Resting-state functional MRI data from more than 4000 UK Biobank participants was combined in order to carry out a large-scale population-average mapping of the major functional networks in the brain. All subjects' structural and functional images were first spatially aligned to each other. Next, an analysis method known as "group-ICA" was used to identify the major resting-state networks/regions; this decomposes the data into a specified number of networks, and was run at two different dimensionalities (25 and 100). The dimensionality determines the number of distinct ICA components; a higher number means that the above-threshold regions within the spatial maps will be smaller.

Network matrices (representing the nodesXnodes functional connectivity) have been estimated for all subjects. Because these are symmetric about the diagonal, only the above-diagonal part of the matrices is stored by UK Biobank. See here for more information on how to work with these files.

Components that are not neuronally driven are discarded during network connectivity modelling (and so don't appear in the maps and connectomes listed above, which therefore have less than the 25/100 original number of components). The lists of good components (with component numbering starting at 1 not 0) are (for the two group-ICA dimensionalities) rfMRI_GoodComponents_d25_v1.txt and rfMRI_GoodComponents_d100_v1.txt. The full original sets of 3D spatial maps, including "bad" nodes are here: 25-components, 100-components).

The dense (voxelwise) connectome can be computed via the MIGP group-PCA Wishart-adjusted weighted eigenvectors file (1.1GB). Simply take the correlation of any voxel's timeseries with all other voxels' timeseries to get a seed-correlation map (i.e., one entry from the full dense connectome). You can generate these single-seed correlation maps on the fly in FSLeyes, by loading the eigenvectors file, clicking on a seed voxel, and pressing Overlay: Seed correlation.