MRI scans of whole sea urchin specimens.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is routinely used in human diagnostics, but can also be applied to study the internal anatomy of zoological specimens. Here, we present 141 MRI scans from 98 representative extant sea urchin species. The scanned specimens were whole sub-adult or adult individuals ranging in size from 5 to 43 mm. The specimens were almost entirely obtained from museum collections. Some of the samples were collected and fixed more than 135 years ago, while others were collected a few months prior to scanning. The detailed MRI acquisition and reconstruction parameters can be found in the metadata files deposited together with the raw image data. In addition, image stacks in tagged image file format (TIFF, .tif) were generated for each scan. Potential uses of the dataset include morphometric and volumetric analyses or comparative studies of internal organs.<br>
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For convenience users can choose to down load all 141 datasets in a single TAR archive file called 141_MRI_scans.tgz (39GB) from the FTP server.<br>
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***Message from GigaDB team***
<br> Please note that due to the conditional formatting of the "Samples" table currently used in GigaDB, the authors wish to point out that the NCBI taxonomy information (columns 2-5) is inappropriate for this study. Instead, the authors strongly recommend the use of the Species names and Aphia IDs provided in the "Sample attributes" section of the "Samples" table, and in the Sea_urchin_samples Excel file .