Similarly, recent collaborative projects have demonstrated the feasibility of conducting multi-site neuroimaging studies in children, laying the foundation for a much larger, comprehensive study of adolescent brain and cognitive development. Such projects include the Pediatric Imaging Neurocognition Genetics (PING) study—a cross-sectional brain imaging (MRI) and genetics database of more than 1500 children and adolescents, designed to map the genomic landscape of the developing brain (Jernigan et al., 2016)—and the National Consortium on Alcohol and Neurodevelopment in Adolescence (NCANDA)—a brain imaging (MRI) study of adolescents designed to determine both the effects of alcohol exposure on brain development and to identify preexisting vulnerabilities for an alcohol use disorder. The NCANDA study recruited more than 800 youth between the ages of 12 and 21 for imaging and neuropsychological testing in an accelerated longitudinal design (Brown et al., 2015), establishing the feasibility of a large-scale prospective study in terms of both recruiting large numbers of suitable participants and harmonizing imaging data from different platforms.
