Neurobagel
Overview
Neurobagel is an open-source ecosystem for federated neuroscience cohort discovery across decentralised BIDS datasets. Developed at McGill University with CONP and ReproNim, it lets researchers search for matching participants across many institutions at once without centralising data: each institution self-hosts a node holding a knowledge graph of harmonised participant-level metadata, and a central federation API aggregates query results across all nodes while the data files stay under local custody.
Standards
Phenotypic data is annotated following BIDS conventions and NIDM terms, with SNOMED CT as the controlled vocabulary for diagnosis, and is represented as JSON-LD knowledge graphs. A DataLad backend supports imaging data download from participating nodes. The companion package Nipoppy, which standardises neuroimaging pipeline tracking, produces Neurobagel-ready metadata, giving a path from raw data curation to federated discovery.
Public nodes
Three public nodes are currently queryable: an OpenNeuro node holding a growing community-annotated subset of its datasets, an INDI node holding public datasets including the CoRR collection, and a Quebec Parkinson Network node that returns discovery results only. The network continues to add institutional nodes.
Connections
- relatedTo: BIDS (Neurobagel annotates phenotypic data following BIDS conventions and exports BIDS-compliant data dictionaries)
- relatedTo: NIDM (the Neurobagel annotation schema was developed with the NIDM community and uses NIDM terms)
- implements: DataLad
Resources
- https://neurobagel.org
- https://query.neurobagel.org (public query tool)
- https://neurobagel.org/user_guide/public_nodes/ (current public nodes list)
- https://github.com/neurobagel (source code)
- https://neurobagel.org/nipoppy/overview/ (Nipoppy documentation)