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©2002-2008 BIRN

NIH initiated the BIRN project in September 2001 with three application-oriented test beds and a coordinating center. This map represents BIRN today, consisting of 36 universities and hospitals and comprising 44 research groups. The BIRN provides a framework for collaborative data sharing.

©2004 BIRN

The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) promotes advances in biomedical and health care research through the development and support of a cyberinfrastructure that facilitates data sharing and multi-institutional collaboration.

Sponsored by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources, the BIRN's charter is to create an environment encouraging biomedical scientists and clinical researchers to make new discoveries by facilitating sharing, analysis, visualization, and data comparisons across laboratories.

©2004 Drs. Diana Price and Eliezer Masliah, Mouse BIRN

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Mouse BIRN researchers are using multi-scale imaging methods to characterize mouse models of human neurological disorders. Ongoing collaborations in basic mouse models of neurological disorders include schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, brain cancer, substance abuse, and multiple sclerosis.

Shown here are two different technologies that provide different types of information at different resolutions and scales. They gray area is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) volume (Duke Center for In Vivo Microscopy). Overlapping that is a large-scale image of half the brain that comprises thousands of individual high resolution electron microscopy images tiled together.  One such image is identified on the large-scale montage by the white inset square and then shown beneath at full magnification.

Technologies such as these allow biomedical researchers to visualize the smallest disease markers within cells and apply their insights to whole brain function. (Animals provided by Dr. Eliezer Masliah, immunolabeling and imaging by Dr. Diana Price, UCSD)

©2004 Drs. Gary Glover and Lara Foland, Stanford University, Function BIRN

The Function BIRN test bed is working to understand the underlying causes of schizophrenia and to develop new treatments for the disease. The effort brings together researchers in different aspects of functional neuroimaging to determine the role of frontal and temporal lobe dysfunction in schizophrenia, and to assess the impact of treatments on functional brain abnormalities.

This image consists of sample data from the Function BIRN's Human Phantom Study, a study that tested five people on collaborator magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners across the country, identified the variances in the resulting data across sites and subjects, and then developed algorithms to normalize these irregularities. This process assures that each site will have sound data to share and compare with other participating sites, creating a larger data pool for use in Function BIRN studies.

The image shows an MRI scan from Stanford's 3T MRI system. The global response to holding one's breath for 15 seconds shows the entire gray matter volume activated.

©2004 Morphometry BIRN

Neuroscientists use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain to investigate how its very complicated structures and functions relate to neurological diseases. Such studies permit doctors to more easily predict the stage of a disease from a brain MRI, and also potentially follow the progression of a disease under treatment.

This example is a 3D brain image obtained from an MRI scan, using a powerful visualization tool called 3D Slicer (http://www.slicer.org/) developed at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The brain is shown in two views, a coronal section (left side) and a surface reconstruction (right side). The different colors represent results from another tool, called FreeSurfer (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/) developed at the Massachusetts General Hospital. FreeSurfer is a computer program that takes the brain MRI and automatically detects and classifies a wide variety of brain structures and brain areas so that quantitative information can be extracted from them, like volume or thickness. This quantitative information can then be used to look for relationships between brain atrophy and behavioral manifestations of neurological disease.

©2004 Morphometry BIRN

To protect patient confidentiality and comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) regulations, Morphometry BIRN has developed a program to facilitate the deidentification of human imaging data, a prime source of biomedical research. In this image, the left panel shows raw structural MRI scan data of a head. The right panel represents the same data after processing through Bruce Fischl’s (Massachusetts General Hospital) face de-identification software. This tool ensures that a subject's facial features are automatically removed without jeopardizing brain tissue data. The code has been integrated with many of the BIRN visualization tools available through the BIRN Portal such 3D Slicer (Brigham and Women's Hospital) and with the rest of the BIRN infrastructure tools.

©2004 BIRN-CC