The Oxytocin Brain Imaging Data Exchange (OBIDE) Initiative

Background: Intranasal oxytocin has been widely investigated for its effects on human brain function, particularly within amygdala-centred circuits, reward pathways, and salience-related networks. However, the neuroimaging literature to date remains limited by small sample sizes, heterogeneous study designs, and substantial variation in participant characteristics, reducing reproducibility and constraining the evaluation of moderators of treatment response. To address these limitations, we established the Oxytocin Brain Imaging Data Exchange (OBIDE), a harmonised international repository of human oxytocin pharmaco-neuroimaging data that will be made openly available to the scientific community.

Methods: The primary aim of this data repository is to provide openly accessible infrastructure for large-scale investigation of oxytocin’s neural effects and to support reproducible secondary analyses. A secondary aim is to facilitate evaluation of methodological and individual-difference moderators, including administration regimen, scanning interval, sex, and age. Contributing sites harmonised de-identified participant-level neuroimaging and phenotypic data using a standardised pipeline. Descriptive statistical analyses were performed to characterise sample composition, study design parameters, and data availability across cohorts.

Results: The initial release dataset includes resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, structural magnetic resonance imaging, and phenotypic data from 914 participants across 11 study cohorts and three institutions in Belgium, China, and the United States. Of these, 485 participants received a single dose of intranasal oxytocin and 427 received placebo in between-subject randomised designs. Participant age ranged from 17 to 81 years (mean age oxytocin: 24.6 years; placebo: 25.1 years). Overall, 79.4% of the participants were male, with six cohorts comprising exclusively male samples. The majority of studies administered 24 international units of oxytocin, while three used 40 international units. Imaging was performed 30–120 minutes post-administration. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging acquisitions averaged 7.6 minutes, with 65.6% conducted under eyes-open and 34.4% under eyes-closed conditions. The dataset is predominantly neurotypical, with one cohort including 40 individuals with autism. Peripheral hormonal measures (endogenous oxytocin and/or cortisol) are available for 147 participants from three cohorts. Quality assurance was performed to assess data preprocessing and motion or signal-related artifacts. All datasets met predefined quality criteria following inspection of motion parameters, normalization, and denoising outputs.

Conclusions: The OBIDE Initiative constitutes one of the largest harmonised repositories of oxytocin pharmaco-neuroimaging data assembled to date and demonstrates the feasibility of large-scale international data harmonisation in this area of research. Its forthcoming public release will provide an openly accessible resource for investigating oxytocin-related neural mechanisms with improved statistical power and transparency. The repository is expected to facilitate more generalisable and reproducible analyses of oxytocin’s effects on brain and behaviour while enabling systematic investigation of methodological and participant-level moderators. Current sample characteristics also highlight persistent limitations in the literature, including underrepresentation of females and limited clinical sampling, underscoring priorities for future data contributions. In the longer term, the repository may support more targeted interventions by identifying profiles linked to oxytocin responsiveness.

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