10kin1day: A bottom-up neuroimaging initiative

Abstract

We organized 10Kin1day, a pop-up scientific event with the goal to bring together neuroimaging groups from around the world to jointly analyze 10,000+ existing MRI connectivity datasets during a 3-day workshop. In this report, we describe the motivation and principles of 10Kin1day, together with a public release of 8,000+ MRI connectome maps of the human brain. Ongoing grand-scale projects like the European Human Brain Project (1), the US Brain Initiative (2), the Human Connectome Project (3), the Chinese Brainnetome (4) and exciting world-wide neuroimaging collaborations such as ENIGMA (5) herald the new era of big neuroscience. In conjunction with these major undertakings, there is an emerging trend for bottom-up initiatives, starting with small-scale projects built upon existing collaborations and infrastructures. As described by Mainen et al. (6), these initiatives are centralized around self-organized groups of researchers working on the same challenges and sharing interests and specialized expertise. These projects could scale and open up to a larger audience and other disciplines over time, eventually lining up and merging their findings with other programs to make the bigger picture.