AfNiA — African Neuroimaging Archive
Overview
AfNiA is an initiative of the CAMERA consortium to build an openly available archive of annotated brain MRI aggregated from clinical and research centres across Africa, so that locally relevant AI and neuroimaging research can be developed on data that represents African populations. It is designed in phases, beginning with around a thousand multi-centre brain MRI images from the Lagos region of Nigeria and intended to expand to several thousand images from other parts of Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa, starting with Ghana and Ethiopia. The design pays particular attention to low-resource settings, including centres without electronic archiving or reliable connectivity. As of 2026 the archive is in development, with an initial public data release rather than a fully operating general repository, so its status is recorded as proposed.
Notable datasets
- BraTS-Africa is the first annotated, openly available brain-imaging dataset from an African population, covering brain-tumour MRI from six Nigerian diagnostic centres, released through an international challenge and then through The Cancer Imaging Archive. Its authors describe it as an initial step toward a sustainable multi-centre data collection, curation, and annotation workflow for resource-constrained settings.
- The labeled Clinical-MRI dataset of Nigerian brains is one of the first openly shared MRI datasets from an African nation, providing pseudonymised structural MRI (T1-weighted, T2-weighted, and FLAIR) from 88 participants spanning healthy controls and individuals with age-related dementia or Parkinson’s disease. It is published on BrainLife.io.
Connections
Resources
- https://www.camera-mri.org
- https://doi.org/10.1148/ryai.240528 (Adewole et al. 2024, Radiology: Artificial Intelligence — BraTS-Africa dataset)
- https://www.cancerimagingarchive.net/collection/brats-africa/ (BraTS-Africa on The Cancer Imaging Archive)
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04743-0 (Wogu et al. 2025, Scientific Data — labeled Clinical-MRI dataset of Nigerian brains)