What rules protect the confidentiality of experimental subjects, and how are these kept in alignment with local IRB regulations and informed consent procedures?
Subject confidentiality is a key issue for the success of the fMRIDC. For each data set being submitted: • Submitting researchers are asked to ensure that subject identifiers have been properly removed and that the data are unlinked. • Data received from researchers will be inspected for potential subject identifiers and these identifiers will be removed from any and all behavioral and neuroimaging data. • Researchers submitting data to the Center may contribute high-resolution structurals that they have stripped themselves or may leave it to the Center to do the stripping for them. • Researchers may download from the Center web site a letter that they may provide to their Human Subjects committee explaining the Center and the steps being taking to protect subject anonymity. Though data submitted to the Center will be cleansed of all identifiers, researchers are advised to consider also informing subjects that their “anonymized” neuroimaging data may be made available to other research
