Neuroimaging Tools Available On Web

A roving band of five unnamed researcher participants-who traveled across the country to nine different sites to have their brains examined via MRI-has contributed to a first-of-its-kind neuroimaging dataset that will help researchers to standardize and calibrate imaging data for multisite studies for years to come. The dataset, known as the Function BIRN Phase I Traveling Subjects Dataset, is the latest of more than two dozen open-source data and software tools made available to researchers worldwide by the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN).

Created in 2001 with NCRR support, BIRN is a national consortium of 28 research institutions and 37 research groups dedicated to creating a usable cyberinfrastructure that shares and integrates data, expertise, and unique technologies from multiple disciplines and research institutions thereby enabling collaborations that address complex health-related problems. (For more information, see the NCRR Reporter, Fall 2003, BIRN Putting Heads Together in Cyberspace.) Initial efforts focus on neuroimaging data, but the tools and technologies developed by BIRN will ultimately be applicable to other disciplines.

Calibration across sites is important, because brain scans from a single individual can appear surprisingly dissimilar when collected using different MRI instruments and methodologies. "In fact, we found there is more variation between sites than there is between subjects," says Steven Potkin, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Irvine, and head of a series of BIRN projects correlation to functional imaging. "Unless this can be corrected, there is no point in doing a multisite imaging study".

The Phase I study of five subjects allowed the Function BIRN research teams to develop techniques that greatly reduce intersite variability, thus laying a solid foundation for Phase II, which will interpret functional neuroimaging datasets from more than 200 subjects examined at MRI facilities nationwide.

Other datasets and tools available for download at the BIRN Web site include data analysis software for correcting image distortions, software for de-indentifying MRI images, data management tools for large and diverse clinical neuroimaging research projects, and several datasets correlation to the mouse brain. On the horizon is a new BIRN project that will focus on neuroimaging of nonhuman primates. To learn more about BIRN's opensource software and data, visit the BIRN Downloads Web page.



Posted by: Scott    Source