Harnessing Neuroscience Data : a Network of Platforms

We are at the beginning of a new era in brain research. Powerful new techniques for capturing neuroimaging, genetic, various ‘omics, and behavioural data non-invasively during development, learning and aging challenge our... [ view full abstract ]

We are at the beginning of a new era in brain research. Powerful new techniques for capturing neuroimaging, genetic, various ‘omics, and behavioural data non-invasively during development, learning and aging challenge our capabilities to manage and explore the data generated. Communities demand tools to manage ever larger study cohorts spread over the world and tracked over decades. Their desire to engage in collaborative Open Science at this scale exacerbate ethical and legal complexities as well as platform interoperability, result reproducibility and provenance tracking issues. The scarcity and fragmentation of research e-Infrastructures to handle these changing needs represents a serious obstacle for the exploitation of such large data sources. The challenge of the coming decade in brain research will be to adapt our analytic toolsets and data platforms to integrate massively multi-dimensional data into a holistic model of brain organization in order to gain insights on its normal trajectory through the lifespan and the perturbations that represent disease or dysfunction. At the McGill Center for Integrative Neuroscience (MCIN), we have been involved for the past two decades with providing the neuroscience community some of the first comprehensive portals for large multi-center studies and for collaborative distributed computing. This talk will present upcoming challenges and tradeoffs involved in adapting our current platforms and data handling techniques to our rapidly growing communities and the emergence of a broader network of platforms. In particular, we will present Boutiques, our cross-platform application repository aimed at increasing interoperability and facilitating reproducibility between multiple platforms.