iSTAGING consortium

Imaging-based coordinate SysTem for AGing and NeurodeGenerative diseases (iSTAGING) is a collection of multi-modal neuroimaging data from more than 10 major studies, initiated with the goal of finding reliable and generalizable coordinate systems to capture human brain heterogeneity across a wide range of the age spectrum.²⁶ Individuals from four studies in the iSTAGING consortium with amyloid status data were investigated: the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI; n = 1767),^27,28 Biomarkers of Cognitive Decline Among Normal Individuals (BIOCARD; n = 279),²⁹ the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA; n = 980),³⁰ and the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS; n = 1028).^31,32 Only participants 48 years or older were included, as the youngest participant with Alzheimer’s disease was 48 years old. Only participants who were classified as CN, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or Alzheimer’s disease from the originating studies were included in the current analysis. The clinical diagnostic criteria were broadly similar across the studies and were described in Supplementary Table 1.

The supervisory committee of each study approved its inclusion in this analysis, and this project was approved by the institutional review board of the University of Pennsylvania. All participants gave written informed consent to each study for data acquisition and analyses according to the Declaration of Helsinki. More detail on each of the four studies can be found in Supplementary Methods 1.