Reduced NEXI protocol for the quantification of human gray matter microstructure on the Connectome 2.0 scanner

================================================================================ BIDS Dataset: Reduced NEXI protocol for the quantification of human gray matter microstructure on the Connectome 2.0 scanner ================================================================================ 1. OVERVIEW ----------- This dataset contains in vivo MRI data from healthy human adults acquired to map gray matter microstructure using Neurite Exchange Imaging (NEXI). Data were collected on an ultra-high gradient 3T Siemens MAGNETOM Connectom.X scanner (Connectome 2.0) to evaluate an Explainable AI (XAI)-optimized 14-minute protocol. 2. STUDY PARTICIPANTS & DESIGN ------------------------------ - Number of subjects: 8 healthy adults (mean age: 29.6 ± 3.9 years). - Sessions & Design: - 7 participants underwent two identical scan sessions (scan-rescan) to evaluate test-retest reproducibility using the standard 2 mm protocol. - 1 participant underwent a single high-resolution session (1.6 mm isotropic) without a rescan session. - Total files: 651 files across 8 subjects and 2 sessions (~18.1 GB). 3. ACQUISITION PROTOCOL (SUMMARY) --------------------------------- All data were acquired on a MAGNETOM Connectom.X 3T scanner (500 mT/m gradients, 600 T/m/s slew rate): - Anatomical Reference: High-resolution T1-weighted MPRAGE (0.9 mm isotropic). - Diffusion-Weighted Imaging (dMRI): Single-shot spin-echo EPI sequence featuring an XAI-optimized 8-feature subset (b-values up to 12.5 ms/µm², multiple diffusion times). - Reverse phase-encoding b0 volumes were included for susceptibility distortion correction. 4. RELATED PUBLICATION ---------------------- If you use these data or reference this dataset, please cite the associated publication (Accepted/In Press): Uhl, Q., Pavan, T., Gerold, J., Chan, K.-S., Jun, Y., Fujita, S., Bhatt, A., Ma, Y., Wang, Q., Lee, H.-H., Huang, S. Y., Bilgic, B., & Jelescu, I. "Reduced NEXI protocol for the quantification of human gray matter microstructure on the Connectome 2.0 scanner." Imaging Neuroscience (Accepted). 5. CODE AVAILABILITY -------------------- Processing scripts, model fitting routines, and the XGBoost-SHAP-RFE optimization pipeline used for this dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Mic-map/graymatter_swissknife https://github.com/QuentinUhl/XAI-dMRI-protocol-optimization