The Three NITRC's: Software, Data and Cloud Computing for Brain Science and Cancer Imaging Research
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1
University of Massachusetts Medical School, Psychiatry Neuroinformatics, United States
Background: Initiated in October 2006 through the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC) has embarked on a mission is to foster a user-friendly knowledge environment for the neuroscience community. By continuing to identify existing software tools and resources valuable to this community, NITRC's goal is to support its researchers dedicated to enhancing, adopting, distributing, and contributing to the evolution of neuroimaging analysis tools and resources.
Methods: Over the years, the scope of NITRC Resources (NITRC-R) has grown to include resources to support MR, PET/SPECT, CT, EEG/MEG, optical imaging and now clinical neuroinformatics and imaging genomics. NITRC has also expanded its capabilities to support image data sharing and computation. In support of enhanced data sharing, NITRC provides an Image Repository, NITRC-IR (http://www.nitrc.org/ir/), which is built on XNAT and provides sharing infrastructure for images and related data. In this era of ever-mounting shared data resources, neuroimaging scientists and cancer imaging researchers are becoming more challenged to secure sufficient computational resources to execute complex computational analysis on these large data resources. Using AWS EC2 and leveraging NeuroDebian, NITRC produced and released the Computational Environment (NITRC-CE) via Amazon’s AWS Marketplace. NITRC-CE is an on-demand, cloud based computational virtual machine pre-installed with popular NITRC neuroimaging tools. A public Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) is also available.
Results: NITRC facilitates access to an ever growing number of neuroinformatics tools and resources (540 to date), many relevant to imaging research, some identify themselves specific to cancer research such as TCIA and MITK Diffusion. NITRC-R averages monthly 17,000 visits and 82,000 pageviews. The NITRC-IR offers 4,764 subjects, and 4,779 MR Imaging Sessions searchable across six projects to promote re-use and integration of these valuable shared data. NITRC-CE provides simplified deployment of cloud-based computation that supports FreeSurfer, FSL, AFNI and many other software resources.
Conclusions: In summary, NITRC is now an established knowledge environment for the neuroimaging community where tools and resources are presented in a coherent and synergistic environment. We encourage the imaging community to continue providing design and content feedback and to utilize these resources in support of data sharing requirements, software dissemination and cost-effective computational performance.
Acknowledgements
National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research and TCG of Washington DC.
Keywords:
Neuroimaging,
Informatics,
data sharing,
Cloud computing,
Software
Conference:
Neuroinformatics 2013, Stockholm, Sweden, 27 Aug - 29 Aug, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Demo
Topic:
Neuroimaging
Citation:
Kennedy
DN and
Haselgrove
C
(2013). The Three NITRC's: Software, Data and Cloud Computing for Brain Science and Cancer Imaging Research.
Front. Neuroinform.
Conference Abstract:
Neuroinformatics 2013.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2013.09.00024
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Received:
08 Apr 2013;
Published Online:
11 Jul 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. David N Kennedy, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Psychiatry Neuroinformatics, Worcester, MA, 01605, United States, David.Kennedy@umassmed.edu