Human Imaging Database Schema
Description:
To address the problems associated with managing the increasingly large and diverse datasets collected throughout the BIRN imaging communities, an extendible database schema and associated application environment has been developed and deployed as part of the Morphometry and Function BIRN test beds. The Human Imaging Database at a particular site can be extended to contain relevant information concerning the research subjects used in an experiment, subject assessments, the experimental data collected, the experimental protocols used and any annotations or statistics (metadata) normally included with an experiment. The major contributions from the development of the Human Imaging Database are as follows:
- The database is composed of an extendible database and structured core. The core database contains a hierarchical description of the experiment (Figure 1). It defines the structure of the experiment and how experimental protocols relate to this hierarchy. This structure allows for the storage of an experiment in a rigorous framework. Each descriptor in the database consists of a "base tuple" which defines the minimum informational requirements of that descriptor. For example, the base description of an experimental event (i.e. stimulus) contains the base information required to describe when that event occurs during an experimental protocol. However, the actual information regarding various stimuli will need to be stored in the database. Therefore, this tuple can be extended for various experiments. For example, a researcher may collect information regarding the actual properties (e.g. frequency and strength) of a tone used during an fMRI experiment. These extended tuples can be re-used and/or modified for other experiments. A comprehensive printout of the data schema is included in the Appendix.
- An extensible framework for the definition and storage of subject assessment data. A dedicated section of the schema has been added to handle the storage of assessment data from a wide variety of assessments. Each assessment is defined through entries to parts of the schema allowing for a very flexible system that allows for the storage of virtually any assessment. Currently, some of the assessments implemented include: Anxiety Status Inventory (ASI), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), North American Adult Reading Test (NAART), Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), SCID non-patient (overview and screening module) modified by Stanford, quick mood scale, race, ethnicity, education, occupation.
- The incorporation of information regarding the history (i.e. provenance) of how derived data was generated. All information regarding the software used to generate derived data (e.g. software name, version, hardware platform) are stored within the Human Imaging Database to allow the full reconstruction of the processing pipeline that was used to generate the data.
Figure: THe Human Imaging Database schema showing the experimental hierarchy portion of the schema. The complete schema can be found in the download areea.
Tutorial: Related tutorials can be found on the Function BIRN Tutorial Site.