Data from: The MRi-Share database: Brain imaging in a cross-sectional cohort of 1,870 university students

We report on MRi-Share, a multi-modal brain MRI database acquired in a
unique sample of 1,870 young healthy adults, aged 18 to 35 years, while
undergoing university-level education. MRi-Share contains structural (T1
and FLAIR), diffusion (multispectral), susceptibility weighted (SWI), and
resting-state functional imaging modalities. Here, we described the
contents of these different neuroimaging datasets and the processing
pipelines used to derive brain phenotypes, as well as how quality control
was assessed. In addition, we present preliminary results on associations
of some of these brain image-derived phenotypes at the whole brain level
with both age and sex, in the subsample of 1,722 individuals aged less
than 26 years. We demonstrate that the post-adolescence period is
characterized by changes in both structural and microstructural brain
phenotypes. Grey matter cortical thickness, surface area and volume were
found to decrease with age, while white matter volume shows increase.
Diffusivity, either radial or axial, was found to robustly decrease with
age whereas fractional anisotropy only slightly increased. As for the
neurite orientation dispersion and densities, both were found to increase
with age. The isotropic volume fraction also showed a slight increase with
age. These preliminary findings emphasize the complexity of changes in
brain structure and function occurring in this critical period at the
interface of late maturation and early aging.