Popis: |
Information management is critical as the landscape of neuroscience related shared resources (data, software, computation, etc.) expands. Since 2006, the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC) has provided a comprehensive support infrastructure for resources in the neuroimaging domain1. Funded by the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research as well as four NIH institutes 2 3, NITRC’s mission is to facilitate finding and comparing neuroimaging resources for neuroimaging analyses. Over the years the scope of these resources has expanded to support scientific domains from MR to PET, SPECT, CT, MEG/EEG, optical imaging, genetic imaging, clinical neuroinformatics and computational neuroscience. A broad set of initiatives have been developed to support these research areas. Early in the course of the development of NITRC, it was realized that a ‘clearinghouse’ of resources was just one component in a desired infrastructure for a complete integration of neuroimaging resources. Specifically, while the original NITRC website—referred to as NITRC-Resources Repository (NITRC-R) facilitated the finding of software and data, there still existed the need for expanding the capacity for data hosting. Furthermore, once a user finds software and data, the current model of downloading each resource to one’s own local computer quickly becomes rate limiting as the magnitude of the shared datasets gets larger and the processing software gets more complex, specific, and CPU intensive. Datasets such as the ‘1000 Functional Connectomes’4, ‘Pediatric Imaging Neurocognition and Genetics (PING)’5 and the ‘Autism Brain Data Exchange (ABIDE)’6, for example, contain thousands of subjects each with structural and resting-state fMRI data for which standard processing can take days per subject. Such examples quickly outstrip the local analysis capability of many investigators and thus motivate the development of additional solutions. To address these challenges, we embarked upon the creation of the NITRC Image Registry (NITRC-IR) to facilitate a data sharing solution that was closely integrated with the resource description, support, promotion, and management functions provided by NITRC-R for its hosted projects. We also embarked upon the development of the NITRC Computational Environment (NITRC-CE), a cloud-based, dynamic, high-performance, and easy-to-use computational plaform that could be tailored to the computational needs of the NITRC community.. |