Brain-CODE: A Secure Neuroinformatics Platform for Management, Federation, Sharing and Analysis of Multi-Dimensional Neuroscience Data

Abstract

Historically, research databases have existed in isolation with no practical avenue for sharing or pooling medical data into high dimensional datasets that can be efficiently compared across databases. To address this challenge, the Ontario Brain Institute’s “Brain-CODE” is a large-scale neuroinformatics platform designed to support the collection, storage, federation, sharing and analysis of different data types across several brain disorders, as a means to understand common underlying causes of brain dysfunction and develop novel approaches to treatment. By providing researchers access to aggregated datasets that they otherwise could not obtain independently, Brain-CODE incentivizes data sharing and collaboration and facilitates analyses both within and across disorders and across a wide array of data types, including clinical, neuroimaging and molecular. The Brain-CODE system architecture provides the technical capabilities to support (1) consolidated data management to securely capture, monitor and curate data, (2) privacy and security best-practices, and (3) interoperable and extensible systems that support harmonization, integration, and query across diverse data modalities and linkages to external data sources. Brain-CODE currently supports collaborative research networks focused on various brain conditions, including neurodevelopmental disorders, cerebral palsy, neurodegenerative diseases, epilepsy and mood disorders. These programs are generating large volumes of data that are integrated within Brain-CODE to support scientific inquiry and analytics across multiple brain disorders and modalities. By providing access to very large datasets on patients with different brain disorders and enabling linkages to provincial, national and international databases, Brain-CODE will help to generate new hypotheses about the biological bases of brain disorders, and ultimately promote new discoveries to improve patient care.

The CAMH Neuroinformatics Platform: A Hospital-Focused Brain-CODE Implementation

“…It shares many conceptual components of Brain-CODE and the CAMH implementations, and provides valuable insight into the challenges of managing longitudinal research data. Compatibility between Brain-CODE and LORIS (Vaccarino et al, 2018 ) using the underlying federation model has been achieved to bridge these two systems towards data integration for specific studies.…”

“…To develop a centralized data management and analytics environment, CAMH approached the OBI to review the design elements of the Brain-CODE platform for large-scale multi-dimensional provincial data management, guided by the FAIR data principles (Jeanson et al, 2014 , 2016 ; Wilkinson et al, 2016 ; Vaccarino et al, 2018 ). The Brain-CODE model met core criteria appropriate for translation to a research hospital environment.…”

“…A central ledger of all participants entered into the platform is supported by the Subject Registry (Vaccarino et al, 2018 ). As a core component of this tool, medical record numbers (MRNs) or health card numbers can be encrypted on entry, allowing for the identification of common participants across studies.…”

An overview of the quality assurance and quality control of magnetic resonance imaging data for the Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative (ONDRI): pipeline development and neuroinformatics

“…An important mandate of the OBI and its IDP-funded research is a commitment to an "Open Data Interface" in which data are to be made available to the global research community in a manner that is in keeping with the FAIR Data Principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (32,33). In recent years a concerted effort to develop a simple standardized method of organizing, annotating and describing neuroimaging data has resulted in the emergence of the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) (34).…”

The Canadian Biomarker Integration Network in Depression (CAN-BIND): magnetic resonance imaging protocols

“…Clinical data are collected and stored in the Ontario Brain Institute's Centre for Ontario Data Exploration (Brain-CODE; www.braincode.ca/; Vaccarino and colleagues 78 ). This online neuroinformatics platform allows researchers to collaborate across distances and work efficiently at multiple sites.…”