SCIENCE

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have received a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) for a center that helps researchers collect and use data on the brain and central nervous system.

The Neuroimaging Informatics and Analysis Center (NIAC) supports Washington University scientists whose research involves brain and central nervous system imaging, according to associate director Daniel Marcus, Ph.D., research assistant professor of radiology at the university's Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR).

"Scans of the brain and other central nervous system structures can get computationally intensive. The analysis of structural brain data on a single patient, for example, consumes significant computing time, and some studies involve scans of a thousand subjects or more," Marcus says. "We're here to support the storage, processing and analysis of that data."

As an example of such data-intensive studies, Marcus notes that Alzheimer's researchers working to understand the disorder's effects on the brain and develop better diagnostic techniques often need to conduct detailed analyses of multiple brain regions.

Directed by Mark Mintun, M.D., vice chair for research in radiology and professor of radiology, of neurobiology and of psychiatry, the NIAC is comprised of three cores: an informatics core, a data analysis core and an administrative/educational core.

The informatics core runs an imaging database, the Central Neuroimaging Data Archive, that includes data from both research scanners in radiology and clinical scanning data from Barnes-Jewish Hospital. Included are scanning results and other potentially relevant data on subjects such as demographics and clinical outcomes, with personal identification data removed to protect patient privacy.

One major mission of the informatics core, according to Marcus, is to help funnel large volumes of data from scanners to a new supercomputer in the Electronic Radiology Lab for expedited analysis.

NIAC's data analysis core researches, refines and applies the latest approaches for transforming the scanner results into information that can be used for medical research.

"As the cutting-edge techniques for processing this raw data emerge and become somewhat stable, our job is to bring them into production," Mintun says. "NIAC speeds up the computer code and clears bottlenecks and bugs so investigators across the spectrum of research can apply these new techniques to their own data."

In addition to running the NIAC, the administrative core supports educational programs including a seminar series, tutorials and training programs.