NMerge: A comprehensive and accessible Alzheimer’s disease patient-level dataset

Abstract Background Accessible datasets are of fundamental importance to the advancement of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research. The AddNeuroMed consortium conducted a longitudinal observational cohort study with the aim to discover AD biomarkers. During this study, a broad selection of data modalities was measured including clinical assessments, magnetic resonance imaging, genotyping, transcriptomic profiling and blood plasma proteomics. Some of the collected data were shared with third-party researchers. However, this data was incomplete, erroneous and lacking in interoperability. Methods We systematically addressed several limitations of the originally shared data and provide additional unreleased data to enhance the patient-level dataset. Results In this work, we publish and describe ANMerge, a new version of the AddNeuroMed dataset. ANMerge includes multimodal data from 1702 study participants and is accessible to the research community via a centralized portal. Conclusions ANMerge is an information rich patient-level data resource that can serve as a discovery and validation cohort for data-driven AD research, such as for example machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches. ANMerge can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.7303/syn22252881