Characterising microstructure in vivo is key to understanding tissue properties and processes in health and disease. Central to this mission, the UK's National Facility for In Vivo MR Imaging of Human Tissue Microstructure (NMIF) houses one of the world's three 'Connectom' MRI scanners, fitted with unique hardware and optimised for imaging tissue microstructure in unprecedented detail. The potential to enable new breakthroughs in neuroscience/medicine with such equipment is huge.
While extremely valuable, however, such resources are also expensive and scarce. Making their data open and widely available to the community in a well-documented, scientifically usable form would maximise their impact. With few exceptions, such practice is rarely adopted by medical imaging researchers. Our multi-disciplinary team, drawing on data sharing principles developed by the Cardiff Astronomy Instrumentation Group (AIG), will define and pioneer a unique scientific and technological platform for sharing NMIF data with the worldwide brain research community, extending the value and scientific applications of the resource. Ancillary information and novel processing workflows will also be published. The Microstructural Imaging Data Centre (MIDaC) will 'blaze a trail' that promotes open data in brain imaging research, and offer a unique resource of state-of-the-art data from one of the most powerful medical imaging instruments currently available.