Italian, European, and international neuroinformatics efforts: An overview

Abstract

Neuroinformatics is a research field that focusses on software tools capable of identifying, analysing, modelling, organising and sharing multiscale neuroscience data. Neuroinformatics has exploded in the last two decades with the emergence of the Big Data phenomenon, characterised by the so‐called 3Vs (volume, velocity and variety), which provided neuroscientists with an improved ability to acquire and process data faster and more cheaply thanks to technical improvements in clinical, genomic and radiological technologies. This situation has led to a ‘data deluge’, as neuroscientists can routinely collect more study data in a few days than they could in a year just a decade ago. To address this phenomenon, several neuroimaging‐focussed neuroinformatics platforms have emerged, funded by national or transnational agencies, with the following goals: (i) development of tools for archiving and organising analytical data (XNAT, REDCap and LabKey); (ii) development of data‐driven models evolving from reductionist approaches to multidimensional models (RIN, IVN, HBD, EuroPOND, E‐DADS and GAAIN BRAIN); and (iii) development of e‐infrastructures to provide sufficient computational power and storage resources (neuGRID, HBP‐EBRAINS, LONI and CONP). Although the scenario is still fragmented, there are technological and economical attempts at both national and international levels to introduce high standards for open and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) neuroscience worldwide.

Differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative dementias with the explainable MRI based machine learning algorithm MUQUBIA

“…The single subject classification tool based on the MUQUBIA models was also made publicly available through the neuGRID platform ( https://neugrid2.eu ) 21 , 52 , 53 , an on-line high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure that provides source code, tools, and data for image processing and ML analysis (see Supplementary Fig. S5 ).…”

The image and data archive at the laboratory of neuro imaging

“…The IDA ( Toga et al, 2010 ; Toga and Crawford, 2015 ; Crawford et al, 2016 ) is a global resource for storing and disseminating neuroimaging, clinical, biospecimen, and genetic data for national and international consortia efforts ( Redolfi et al, 2022 ) as well as smaller, single-center studies. Locally developed and managed at LONI, clinical data, imaging data, and analysis results are uploaded to the IDA daily, allowing users to obtain data from multiple studies within a single system.…”

A modular framework for multi-scale tissue imaging and neuronal segmentation

“…Describing the mammalian brain connectome at the cellular and subcellular scales is one of the holy grails in neuroscience [1][2][3] . The brain comprises billions of densely packed neurons 4 .…”