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| Stephen H. Koslow |
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National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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Presentation: |
| 2002-10-05, 17:30-18:10 |
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| Integration of Brain Structural and Functional Analysis: Data Bases and Information Management Systems. |
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The armamentarium of contemporary technologies used to understand brain structure and function break new ground in terms of our ability to collect data at high levels of granularity from the level of the gene to the intact functioning brain in a living, behaving subjects. While there are many challenges in this exciting research area two of the greatest are the: (1) creative design and completion of appropriate experiments revealing new information and (2) integration of data from the molecular to the structural and functional data obtained from, for example, an fMRI experiment. Success in the first one requires a creative mind, intellect and knowledge of current data and our understanding of brain structure/function. The second, in my opinion requires the creation of new data infrastructure and the sharing of primary data.1, 2. The creation of a data infrastructure will also facilitate challenge (1) by providing immediate and easy access to primary data. The data integration issue is further complicated by the every increasing quantity of data production. The infrastructure required to solve this problem is similar to that created for genome projects. The creation of databases, analytical tools and models has greatly enabled this field. A similar system for the brain sciences should also enable out efforts to understand brain structure and function. The field of informatics provides the knowledge to build this capacity. Informatics offers us the ability to store, retrieve, access, visualize, analyze, integrate, electronic collaboration and share data. The neuroscience informatics will be different than bioinformatics in that there will probably be distributed and federations of databases and not one central database. Similar to bioinformatics we will need to create unique databases and tools to capture the diverse data types and data forms. To create this ability requires a great deal of work to ensure that databases and tools are interoperable, that is that “computers can interact” with each other. Using current technology this would require the use of a standard terminology, an ontology, for all data types and experimental conditions, with the ability to continually add and update terms. Also requiring unique attention are the cultural issues, quality assurance, metadata, analytical and modeling tools and legal and ethical issues. This presentation will discuss these issues in depth; provide examples of existing database and analytical tools that are under development3, as well as global efforts that are underway in this area. 4
1. Koslow, S.H. and Hyman, S.E. Neuroscience in the new Millennium. Einstein Quarterly, 17: (1) 7-15, 2000.
2. Koslow, S.H. Should the Neuroscience Community make a paradigm shift to sharing primary data? Nature Neuroscience, 3 (9): 863-865, 2000
3. Koslow, S.H. Sharing Primary Data: A Threat Or Asset to Discovery? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3 (4) 311-313, 2002
4. Report on Neuroinformatics from The Global Science Forum Neuroinformatics Working Group of the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development. www.oecd.org/sti/gsf. |
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