Medical imaging has enormous potential for early disease prediction, but is impeded by the difficulty and expense of acquiring datasets prior to symptom onset. UK Biobank aims to address this problem directly by acquiring high quality, consistently acquired imaging data from 100,000 predominantly healthy participants, with health outcomes tracked over coming decades. The brain imaging includes structural, diffusion and functional modalities. Along with body and cardiac imaging, genetics, lifestyle measures, biological phenotyping and health records, this is expected to enable discovery of imaging markers of a broad range of diseases at their earliest stages, as well Users may view, print, copy, and download text and data-mine the content in such documents, for the purposes of academic research, subject always to the full Conditions of use

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI) allows one to study functional connectivity in the brain by acquiring fMRI data while subjects lie inactive in the MRI scanner, and taking advantage of the fact that functionally related brain regions spontaneously co-activate. rfMRI is one of the two primary data modalities being acquired for the Human Connectome Project (the other being diffusion MRI). A key objective is to generate a detailed in vivo mapping of functional connectivity in a large cohort of healthy adults (over 1,000 subjects), and to make these datasets freely available for use by the neuroimaging community. In each subject we acquire a total of one hour of whole-brain rfMRI data at 3 Tesla, with a spatial resolution of 2×2×2mm and a temporal resolution of 0.7s, capitalizing on recent developments in slice-accelerated echo-planar imaging. We will also scan a subset of the cohort at higher field strength and resolution. In this paper we outline the work behind, and rationale for, decisions taken regarding the rfMRI data acquisition protocol and pre-processing pipelines, and present some initial results showing data quality and example functional connectivity analyses.