Children and Young People’s SLaM Image Bank – a description of a diverse London digital cohort linking brain MRI to electronic mental health records

A London hospital trust is building a digital bank linking children’s brain scans to their mental health records, creating a resource that currently barely exists for researchers. Researchers studying childhood brain differences across mental health conditions and neurodiversity face a fundamental problem: there are almost no large, diverse datasets that connect brain imaging data to real-world clinical records. This project addresses that gap directly. It will identify which young people treated by South London and Maudsley (SLaM) Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services have had a brain scan, describe their clinical profiles, and check whether those with scans differ from the broader CAMHS population. If successful, this image bank will give researchers essential background information before they launch deeper studies. It will help them understand who has been scanned, what conditions they represent, and how representative that group is. This is foundational infrastructure for future work on childhood mental health—not a treatment or a diagnostic tool itself, but the kind of resource that makes those advances possible. Without it, studies risk drawing conclusions from unrepresentative or poorly described samples.