The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), for example (Weiner et al. 2012), scanned around 800 people in its first phase, including healthy elderly people, individuals with mild cognitive impairment and patients with Alzheimer’s disease. ADNI began in 2005, after testing the feasibility and reproducibility of a range of scanning protocols. This led to standardized scanning methods implemented at 58 sites across North America (Leow et al. 2009; Jahanshad et al. 2010; Jack 2012; Zhan et al. 2012). Many other neuroimaging consortia have been established, including the functional Brain Imaging Research Network (FBIRN) (Potkin and Ford 2009) which has developed standardized methods for multi-center functional MRI studies (Glover et al. 2012) and the Mind Clinical Imaging Consortium (Gollub et al. 2013) focusing on schizophrenia, as well as research networks focusing on pediatric imaging (Evans 2006), autism (Ecker et al. 2013), HIV/AIDS (Cohen et al. 2010) and many others. In fact, the successes of these multi-site initiatives have led to large-scale neuroimaging efforts being initiated and funded in other countries (Carrillo et al. 2012; Alzheimer’s Association 2013; White et al. 2013).
