Informatics and Data Mining Tools and Strategies for the Human Connectome Project

Abstract

NEUROINFORMATICSwith electroencephalography (MEG/EEG). A battery of behavioral and cognitive tests will also be included along with the collection of genetic material. This endeavor will yield valuable information about brain connectivity, its relationship to behavior, and the contributions of genetic and environmental factors to individual differences in brain circuitry. The data generated by the WU-Minn HCP consortium will be openly shared with the scientific community.The HCP has a broad informatics vision that includes support for the acquisition, analysis, visualization, mining, and sharing of connectome-related data. As it implements this agenda, the consortium seeks to engage the neuroinformatics community through open source software, open programming interfaces, open-access data-sharing, and standards-based development. The HCP informatics approach includes three basic domains.• Data support components include tools and services that manage data (e.g., data uploads from scanners and other data collection devices); execution and monitoring of quality assurance, image processing, and analysis pipelines and routines; secure long-term storage of acquired and processed data; search services to identify and select subsets of the data; and download mechanisms to distribute data to users around the globe. IntroductIonThe past decade has seen great progress in the refinement of noninvasive neuroimaging methods for assessing long-distance connections in the human brain. This has given rise to the tantalizing prospect of systematically characterizing human brain connectivity, i.e., mapping the connectome (Sporns et al., 2005 The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a major endeavor that will acquire and analyze connectivity data plus other neuroimaging, behavioral, and genetic data from 1,200 healthy adults. It will serve as a key resource for the neuroscience research community, enabling discoveries of how the brain is wired and how it functions in different individuals. To fulfill its potential, the HCP consortium is developing an informatics platform that will handle: (1) storage of primary and processed data, (2) systematic processing and analysis of the data, (3) openaccess data-sharing, and (4) mining and exploration of the data. This informatics platform will include two primary components. ConnectomeDB will provide database services for storing and distributing the data, as well as data analysis pipelines. Connectome Workbench will provide visualization and exploration capabilities. The platform will be based on standard data formats and provide an open set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will facilitate broad utilization of the data and integration of HCP services into a variety of external applications. Primary and processed data generated by the HCP will be openly shared with the scientific community, and the informatics platform will be available under an open source license. This paper describes the HCP informatics platform as currently envisioned and places it into the context of the o...

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