BrainLat — Latin American Brain Health Institute
Overview
The Latin American Brain Health Institute (BrainLat) is a research and capacity-building institute at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile, focused on dementia and brain health across Latin American populations that are under-represented in global neuroscience data. Launched in 2020 and guided by an international advisory board, it produces open multimodal datasets, runs implementation-science and training programmes, and supports regional research through seed grants and postdoctoral positions. Its open-neuroscience relevance rests on the BrainLat dataset, a multimodal collection of neurodegeneration data from five Latin American countries that addresses the near-total absence of the region’s populations from open brain-imaging resources. BrainLat works in close partnership with the ReDLat dementia-research consortium and is affiliated with the Global Brain Health Institute at the University of California San Francisco and Trinity College Dublin.
Open data
The BrainLat dataset is a multimodal neuroimaging and cognitive collection of 780 participants from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, comprising 530 patients with neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s disease, behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis) and 250 healthy controls. It includes anatomical MRI, resting-state fMRI, diffusion-weighted MRI, high-density resting-state EEG, and clinical and cognitive assessments, collected under harmonized ReDLat recruitment and assessment procedures. The neuroimaging data is organized according to the BIDS specification, with EEG converted to EEG-BIDS. Described in a 2023 Scientific Data descriptor, it is distributed through the Synapse platform under a controlled-access data use agreement. It is one of the first regional open collections combining high spatial-resolution (fMRI) and high temporal-resolution (EEG) recordings across multiple neurodegenerative diseases in Latin American populations.
Connections
- relatedTo: ReDLat (BrainLat and the ReDLat consortium jointly led the multimodal BrainLat dataset)
- registeredIn: Synapse AMP-AD
- requires: BIDS
Resources
- https://brainlat.uai.cl
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02806-8 (Prado et al. 2023, Scientific Data — BrainLat dataset descriptor)
- https://doi.org/10.7303/syn51549340 (BrainLat dataset on Synapse)
- https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.12710 (Duran-Aniotz et al. 2022, Alzheimer’s & Dementia — BrainLat institute overview)