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Neurosurgery can produce recordings, stimulation results, brain maps, images and behavioral observations that may answer questions beyond the immediate clinical need. When these records are carefully annotated, shared under appropriate safeguards and combined across studies, they can help researchers investigate how the brain works. Published projects show that reuse is possible; they do not show that it has already redefined brain science or establish how much potentially useful data remains unavailable.
What counts as unused neurosurgical data?
“Unused” does not necessarily mean that a hospital is throwing away a complete, research-ready dataset. It can mean that information collected during care is not preserved in a form that researchers can find, interpret or reuse. Recordings may be tied to a clinical question, stored without enough context, or unavailable for research. The NIH’s BRAIN 2025 scientific vision identifies this as an opportunity and recommends that intraoperative brain-function mapping be stored, fully annotated and made available to researchers where possible. It is a recommendation, not evidence that every hospital currently records or discards the same kinds of data.
Potentially useful material includes electrical activity recorded from the brain, the locations of electrodes, stimulation settings, images, and notes about what a participant was doing or experiencing at a particular time. Some data arise during epilepsy monitoring or other procedures involving implanted electrodes; other information comes from mapping performed during surgery. Clinical decisions remain the priority: the NIH vision describes research in settings such as clinical diagnostic procedures, trials or clinically indicated treatment, with close coordination among clinicians and researchers and attention to safety.
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How could these records help explain how the brain works?
A clinical recording is usually collected to help answer a specific medical question. Reuse can let researchers ask a different one—for example, how activity in a recorded region relates to memory, or what changes when a region is electrically stimulated. Recordings paired with behavior and electrode locations can make signals more interpretable; imaging can help place those observations in a wider picture of the brain.
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Stimulation is especially informative because it lets researchers examine what happens after activity in a brain region is changed, rather than only observing which signals occur together. A 2020 Scientific Data resource combined intracranial electrical stimulation with functional MRI in 26 people with medically refractory epilepsy who had implanted electrodes. Its materials include electrode locations, stimulation parameters and imaging, organized using the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS). This is one specific dataset, not a representative sample of neurosurgical patients or proof that every stimulation effect can be generalized to people without epilepsy.
Behavioral events and session notes also matter. Without them, a voltage trace may show when a signal occurred but not whether a participant was recalling a word, responding to a task or receiving stimulation. Context allows later investigators to test new hypotheses without pretending that the original clinical procedure was designed to answer every future research question.
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What has already been shared?
The strongest evidence for feasibility comes from documented research resources—not from a field-wide count of all clinical brain data. A 2023 Neuron paper by Rahimzadeh and colleagues describes sharing by the BRAIN Initiative Research Opportunities in Humans Consortium (RAM):
| Resource | What the paper reports | What it can illustrate |
|---|---|---|
| RAM project | Annotated data from more than 400 neurosurgical patients and more than 1,700 experimental sessions, reported by the consortium authors in 2023. The patients underwent intracranial electrode recording for seizure mapping; sessions mostly involved memory experiments and/or brain stimulation. | Data collected in a clinical setting can support multiple research tasks when recordings are shared with experimental context. |
| Concurrent stimulation and functional MRI | A 2020 resource from Howard and colleagues includes 26 people with medically refractory epilepsy and implanted electrodes. | Electrical stimulation, electrode locations and whole-brain imaging can be brought together in a reusable resource. |
| Direct electrical stimulation | A 2024 Nature Communications paper reports de-identified stimulation data deposited in DABI in iEEG BIDS format, alongside imaging and analysis-code details. | Publishing data and methods can make later examination of a specific experiment possible; it does not make every related dataset open or clinically generalizable. |
The RAM paper describes more than raw recordings: shared materials include demographics, electrode locations, imaging-related files, seizure-onset information, experiment documents, session notes, behavioral events and stimulation tasks. The authors also describe efforts to convert data to established formats and reuse them for training and tool development. They report obtaining informed consent to share de-identified data for that project. These are project-specific practices, not a universal description of consent or access conditions. See the 2023 paper for the resource and its methods.
Why do annotations and shared formats matter?
A file is not automatically reusable because it can be downloaded. Other researchers need to know what each channel represents, where electrodes were placed, when stimulation occurred, what task was underway, and how events were recorded. Missing or inconsistent descriptions can make it difficult to compare results or reproduce an analysis. The RAM project’s combination of recordings, notes, locations, task information and imaging-related material shows the practical curation work involved.
Shared formats help make those descriptions more consistent and support tools that can read data from different studies. BIDS is one such standard used in the 2020 resource; the 2024 study reports iEEG BIDS. A format does not resolve every difference in experimental design, participant population or measurement, but it can make files and metadata easier to inspect and process.
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The infrastructure is not one universal repository. The NIH BRAIN Initiative describes work in data science and informatics as supporting archiving, integration, interpretation, visualization and reuse. Its data and knowledge resources page lists specialized archives, including DANDI for cellular neurophysiology, electrophysiology, optophysiology and behavioral time-series data. The appropriate archive depends on the data type and modality; repository choice alone does not guarantee complete metadata or unrestricted access.
What needs to happen before clinical data can be reused?
Making a record useful beyond its original clinical purpose takes coordinated work. A practical pathway includes:
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- Preserve relevant material where feasible. Identify what can be retained without interfering with care, equipment operation or clinical workflows.
- Document the context. Record the meaning of channels, electrode locations, timing, stimulation parameters, tasks and relevant clinical context, while limiting sensitive details to what is justified.
- Establish consent and access conditions. Explain what sharing means, who may access the data and what protections apply. Review access according to the study’s consent and governance rather than assuming all data can be posted openly.
- Prepare the data for reuse. De-identify where appropriate, use established formats when suitable, and include documentation and analysis details that let others understand the files.
- Curate and maintain the resource. Archive data with enough staffing and technical support to preserve quality, answer access questions and keep files usable over time.
The NIH BRAIN Initiative’s data science and informatics overview describes archiving and interoperability as part of a broader effort to enable integration and reuse. It notes that the NIH Data Management and Sharing policy took effect for covered applications submitted on or after January 25, 2023; that date alone should not be taken as a complete statement of current requirements for every project or dataset.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What are the privacy and interpretation risks?
De-identification reduces exposure of direct identifiers, but it is not a guarantee that brain data carry no privacy risk. The NIH Neuroethics Working Group’s 2023 workshop summary on sharing human brain data discusses possible inferences involving movement intention, language, sensory perception, behavior, cognitive and affective states, memories, sleep and health. These are possibilities considered by the workshop, not capabilities established for every dataset or a claim that a particular record reveals all of them.
Consent, privacy review and access controls should reflect the data and the context in which they were collected. A research resource may be de-identified yet still require controlled access, and the terms for one project cannot be assumed to apply to another. The RAM paper’s account of consent for its own de-identified sharing demonstrates one project-level approach; it does not establish that all shared neurosurgical data use the same protections.
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Existing resources show that data from clinical monitoring and procedures can be organized and reused for research. They also show why useful reuse depends on more than collecting signals: annotation, context, compatible formats, curation, consent and governance all shape what other researchers can do with a dataset.
The cited patient and session counts describe particular projects, not the total volume of unused neurosurgical data, the typical patient population or a representative cross-section of hospitals. The sources do not provide a reliable field-wide estimate of inaccessible data or a causal measure of how much reuse has advanced brain science. The title’s promise is therefore a possibility: better reuse could help test and refine explanations of brain function, but a field-wide transformation has not been demonstrated by these examples.
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