Washington

Head first: brain data, such as this MRI scan, will soon be brought together on the Internet. Credit: SPL

Data on the human brain will soon be available over the Internet via an electronic gateway. Currently being planned by an international consortium, the portal will give researchers access to data at various levels of detail and sophistication.

Backed in principle by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the consortium aims to devise common standards and procedures for the various neuroinformatics databases and software programs scattered around the world.

An OECD working group set up to develop the gateway met for the first time in Genoa last month, and announced that it plans to make decisions on a launch date at its next meeting in Washington in September.

“We'd like to create a portal that would provide access to all the resources that are out there,” says Stephen Koslow, director of the Office on Neuroinformatics with the US National Institute of Mental Health, and chair of the OECD working group.

Koslow points out that many individual programs already exist, each working at their own levels of analysis. Finding them and linking them to one site will be the first step, he explains. The next step will be to make them work with each other.

The project resembles earlier efforts to built computational tools for studying genomes. Many groups independently created computer programs that eventually became consolidated into software suites.

But neuroinformatics covers a broader spectrum of tools than computational genomics, ranging from brain imaging to the study of genes and proteins. And tying together data dealing with different levels of analysis is a huge challenge. Data can be in many forms, including brain scans showing the development of Alzheimer's disease and genetic databases detailing susceptibility to the disease.

Scientists involved in the Human Brain Project — a US government-backed effort to develop a variety of neuroinformatics tools — are already working to make the various pieces of software more accessible.

Jonathan Cohen, professor of psychology at Princeton University, said last week that although independence in the early days of neuroinformatics software development had resulted in many useful programs, it had also created an electronic ‘Tower of Babel’.

“Since a lot of people build these things on their own, they are not always in a format that everyone can use,” Cohen told a conference on the Human Brain Project held last week in Bethesda, Maryland.

Cohen's group is providing ‘wrappers’ to make different programs look the same on a computer screen. So far, this ‘FisWidgets’ project has provided interfaces for 43 public-domain neuroimaging programs.

Another problem is that data can be in different forms, or images in different resolutions. This is especially daunting when developing multiple-scale models of the nervous system, Nigel Goddard, a bioinformatician at the University of Edinburgh, told the meeting. Such modelling provides a broad map of a system, along with the ability to zoom in on selected parts for greater detail, and retrieve data associated with that image. “We need to have some set of standards so we can integrate the efforts,” said Goddard.