Working papers
One paper per subsystem, written by the team that built it. Filter by module, or read the whole set.
Worked examples of the index format. Titles and statuses show how entries will be presented; none is a published paper yet.
Papers are listed here once a draft exists. Subsystems still in design do not get a placeholder entry — an empty row would imply work that hasn't happened.
RFC index
Every governance and design decision is proposed in public before it lands. Anyone can open one; the council reads all of them, and patient advocates vote alongside clinical and technical members.
Example RFCs illustrating the format and the kinds of decision that go through it. No RFC below has been ratified by the council — the states shown are illustrative.
Datasets & registries
Cohorts are described publicly and queried where they live. No dataset listed here is downloadable from us, because no dataset listed here is held by us — the description is the shared artefact, not the data.
Example cohort descriptions showing the metadata each one carries. Names, site counts and scales are illustrative; no cohort below is currently enrolled.
Replication tracker
The uncomfortable table. Every headline result is re-run at a site that had no part in producing it, and the outcome is published either way — including when performance drops.
The rows below are worked examples, deliberately including a weakened and a failed outcome to show that those get published too. The deltas are not measurements, and sites stay unattributed until a real result exists and that site has agreed to be named.
Open questions
The things we don't know, stated plainly. Patients ask these constantly and the honest answer is that the field cannot yet answer them — which is exactly why they are the research agenda.
Why do symptoms so often fail to match the size of a Chiari herniation?
AURORA-CHIARIMillimetres of descent explain remarkably little about how a person feels. Until that gap is understood, surgical selection stays partly a judgement call — and patients are the ones carrying the uncertainty.
Read the patient guide on this →Can raised intracranial pressure in infants be detected without invasive monitoring?
AURORA-CRANIOCurrent non-invasive indicators miss cases. Every missed case is a child whose pressure is treated late, and every false positive is an operation that may not have been needed.
What parents are told today →Which patients genuinely benefit from ETV rather than a shunt?
AURORA-HYDROThe retrospective record is too confounded to answer this causally, and the honest position is that we are choosing between options without the evidence a family would expect us to have.
How this is explained to families →Do imaging-derived tumour features survive a change of scanner?
AURORA-GLIOOur own replication says: often not. A feature that works only on the scanner it was developed on is a publication, not a tool.
See the replication result →How much of reported CSF flow variation is protocol rather than physiology?
AURORA-CHIARIIf most of it is protocol, a decade of flow-study literature needs re-reading. The paired-site study exists to find out.
Read the working paper →What outcome measures actually matter to patients over a lifetime?
Cross-moduleMost registries record what is easy to record. Patient advocates on the council have consistently said the recorded endpoints are not the ones they live with.
Governance & ethics →How to cite AURORA
Cite the module and version you actually used, not the project in general — module behaviour changes between versions, and a citation that can't be pinned to one isn't reproducible.
@software{aurora_chiari_2026,
title = {AURORA-CHIARI: federated substrate for Chiari malformation},
author = {{AURORA Collective}},
year = {2026},
version = {0.1.0-pilot},
note = {Research use only. Not a certified medical device.},
url = {https://aurora.health/modules/chiari}
}