The long-term objective is to design and develop the next generation of information systems to secure broad range of neurologic research applications on the World Wide Web. This five-year project will be focused on the design and implementation of an electronic data warehouse for two areas of epilepsy research - the identification of genes related to epilepsy expression and the in vivo investigation of seizure substrates in human partial epilepsy. We hypothesize that an electronic data warehouse can be used to: (1) implement a genometric strategy that enables the identification of allozymes, common allelic variants of normal genes, that predispose to epilepsy; and (2) implement multimodal image fusion techniques that support noninvasive epilepsy surgical planning and outcomes research. To investigate this hypothesis, the specific aims are: (i) the design of a new, scalable, secured framework of Web-based distributed information systems to manage and access neurologic data at various levels of granularity, from multimodality brain images and patient history to neuropathologic and genotype information; (ii) the acquisition of neurogenetic, neuroimaging, and clinical neurologic data of epilepsy patient cohorts; (iii) the processing, extraction, and organization of these data into an object oriented brain data model; (iv) the development of a suite of Web and Java-based neuro-analytical and visualization tools; and (v) the evaluation of electronic data warehouse developed with carefully designed experiments in both basic and clinical epilepsy research. This multidisciplinary project from UCSF will be led by expert of medical informatics and researchers in basic neuroscience and epilepsy. The vertically integrated database system will acquire, filter, organize and manage diverse kinds of epilepsy patient data, including images, signals, video, clinical reports, lab results, phenotype, and genotype data. It will be developed using the sophisticated database, networking , analysis, and visualization resources available at UCSF and will emphasize open systems technologies such as Java and the World Wide Web. The success of this phase I project will enable subsequent large scale genetic and clinical research of epilepsy and related brain diseases. The software product and architectural model developed will be generalizable and extensible so that it can be put into wide use by the brain and behavioral science community. Furthermore, its security architecture will ensure neurologic databases developed by the community to be sharable confidently and efficiently through the Web.
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