Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative: Integration and Analysis of BRAIN Initiative Data

Presenter:

Greg Farber, Ph.D. and Ming Zhan, Ph.D.
Office of Technology Development and Coordination

Goal:

This concept supports the development of informatics tools for analyzing, visualizing, and integrating data related to the BRAIN Initiative to enhance our understanding of brain circuits. This concept is part of the ongoing development of an informatics infrastructure for the BRAIN Initiative. Other informatics programs include developing data standards that are needed to describe the new experiments created by or used in the BRAIN Initiative (RFA-MH-20-128 ) and creating the data infrastructures that would house the data from multiple experimental groups (RFA-MH-20-600 ).

This concept would continue supporting several related activities, including:

1. Modifying existing analysis and visualization tools to deal with BRAIN Initiative data and integrating different types of BRAIN Initiative datasets
2. Developing new tools to deal with BRAIN Initiative data

This concept aims to support tools that are user-friendly in accessing and analyzing data from appropriate data archives and analyze/visualize data without requiring users to download data. The tools should also allow data to be combined for analysis/visualization from multiple locations.

The tools shall make use of relevant data standards; and be built to integrate into relevant data repositories. In many cases, those standards and repositories will have received support as part of the BRAIN Initiative informatics program.

Rationale:

Since 2017, NIMH has issued multiple BRAIN Initiative awards supporting software relevant to the analysis of brain simulation, electronic microscopy data, light microscopy data, neuroimaging data, neurophysiology data, and multi-omics data. As the BRAIN Initiative continues, there are continued needs to develop software to integrate, visualize and analyze the data that are being generated. As part of this concept, the renewal of RFA-MH-19-147  and other related BRAIN Initiative Funding Opportunity Announcements would be possible.