Understanding privacy
in brain imaging.

Evidence behind the guidance

Scientific papers, reproducible analyses and practical tools provide the foundations for this resource. The audience pages explain how imaging properties, demographic combinations and access arrangements contribute to privacy assessments, distinguishing published evidence from ongoing expert-consensus work.

Metadata privacy in neuroimaging

Published paper · linked analysis. Assessing metadata privacy in neuroimaging examines participant metadata from selected OpenNeuro datasets using metaprivBIDS. Demographic combinations deserved particular attention; clinical information could remain sensitive even when it contributed little to identification. The study assessed potential vulnerabilities without attempting to identify participants.

Read the paper · Explore the analyses · Get metaprivBIDS

Expert ratings of identification likelihood

Work in progress · analysis hosted here. This project examines identification-related properties across imaging modalities and processing levels. A central distinction is between matching individual-specific brain patterns and connecting data to a real-world identity. The working manuscript informs the audience summaries, but provisional numerical ratings are not presented here as final recommendations.

Explore the ratings project

About the initiative

Brain Imaging Privacy brings together evidence and expert perspectives on the responsible use and sharing of brain imaging data. Its scope includes acquired images and recordings, associated metadata, individual maps, matrices and summary results.

The website is being developed alongside an expert-consensus paper. It is designed for community maintenance: contributors can propose evidence and corrections through GitHub, with review before changes to guidance. Cyril Pernet coordinates the initial development; additional maintainers and reviewers can join through the contribution process.

Current status: the audience pages now contain source-linked summaries of the published metadata study and the working consensus manuscript, adapted for each readership. The summaries await expert review. Content-update dates are shown separately from any future approval or review dates.