PANDORA: Population Archive of Neuroimaging Data Organized for Rapid Analysis

Abstract Population-scale neuroimaging allows for novel biological discovery, but voxelwise analyses are computationally paralyzing and noisy, whereas imaging-derived phenotypes discard crucial spatial detail. We introduce PANDORA (Population Archive of Neuroimaging Data Organized for Rapid Analysis), a data-adaptive modelling platform designed to resolve this trade-off. PANDORA has encoded brain MRI data comprising 98 sub-modalities from over 80,000 UK Biobank participants in a highly efficient supervoxel representation. By performing statistical regressions directly within this compressed embedding, PANDORA reduces storage by up to 99% and accelerates computation 10-fold, while acting as a spatial denoiser to enhance statistical power. PANDORA also includes the full-resolution voxelwise ground-truth data, curated imaging confound variables, and a fast analysis tool achieving whole brain, voxelwise population-level regression in seconds to minutes. We showcase PANDORA’s ability to reproduce known patterns and reveal new associations including trauma, anxiety/depression, autism polygenic scores, and EPHA3 .