The overarching goal of this project is to secure, link, and disseminate BRAIN Initiative data, including electrophysiology, imaging, behavioral, and clinical data with all pertinent recording and imaging parameters, coming from participating sites. Our plan for a Data Archive for the Brain Initiative (DABI) is in response to RFA-MH-17-255. The Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) at USC has established itself as a hub for delivering effective informatics and analytics solutions in the context of big data for major projects in the study of a range of neurological diseases. LONI has demonstrated and proven experience with variations in data descriptions, data incompleteness, and data harmonization; we have built data portals and query engines for efficient search and utilization, and we have, most importantly, enabled broad data (re-)use toward accelerated discovery. Just as the ADNI (http://adni.loni.usc.edu/) project has been a powerful catalyst for success in biomarker research in Alzheimer's disease, this project has the power to foster a similar and potentially greater level of success for human neurophysiological data. Furthermore, we understand the needs of investigators who have collected these data and their concerns associated with data sharing, in addition to the privacy of the subjects from whom the data are collected. We have the extensive infrastructure in place to handle such large-scale data as well as LONI's Pipeline Processing Environment for streamlined integration of analytic tools. This platform will be designed with the flexibility to integrate input from those awarded grants to address standardization of data (RFA-MH-17-256) as well as those who design tools to interface with archives (RFA-MH-17-257). We will receive and de-identify data of various modalities from the participating sites, incorporating analysis tools previously developed at LONI and elsewhere, managing the data access systems, providing user interfaces to explore, visualize, interpret, and download the data, and provide comprehensive information about the projects and corresponding data through the public website that will be developed specifically for DABI.
We aim to provide a tool for investigators that will decrease the burden of archiving the data once it has been generated. We have already created a true community by having established good communication among our group of collaborators from funded BRAIN Initiative programs. Furthermore, we will be working with industry partners that are anticipated major sources of data to specifically streamline methods for data upload from those sources.
The purpose of this proposal for a Data Archive for the Brain Initiative (DABI) is to develop web-accessible data archives to capture, store, and curate data related to the BRAIN Initiative proposals that collect invasive human neurophysiological data and make them broadly available and accessible to the research community for furthering research. Data will include electrophysiology, imaging, behavioral, and clinical data with all pertinent recording and imaging parameters coming from the participating sites. This involves receiving and de-identifying data of various modalities from the participating sites, incorporating analysis tools previously developed at LONI and elsewhere, managing the data access systems, providing user interfaces to explore, visualize, interpret, and download the data, and providing comprehensive information about the projects and corresponding data through the public website that will be developed specifically for DABI.
