The initiative Psychiatric Imaging Network Germany (PING) serves to coordinate, standardize and optimize data acquisition and storage of the neuroimaging studies within the Forschungsnetz zu psychischen Erkrankungen (German overview here) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). By establishing a central database for all imaging data collected at the nine participating clusters, it marks the beginning of an extensive, sustainable infrastructure enabling the analyses of structural and functional changes associated with psychiatric disorders on a larger scale. PING aims to improve our understanding of brain networks and alterations across diagnostic categories, modalities and imaging centers by:

 

The current technical standards agreed upon can be found here.

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