BRAIN INITIATIVE RESOURCE: DEVELOPMENT OF A HUMAN NEUROELECTROMAGNETIC DATA ARCHIVE AND TOOLS RESOURCE (NEMAR)

About This Grant

To take advantage of recent and ongoing advances in intensive and large-scale computational methods and to preserve the scientific data created by publicly funded research projects, archives for sharing data must be created, as well as standards for specifying, identifying, and annotating deposited data. The value of an interest in such archives among researchers can be greatly increased by adding to them an active computational capability and framework of analysis and search tools that support further analysis as well as larger-scale meta-analysis and large-scale data mining. OpenNeuro.org, founded as a repository for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, is such an archive. We have built a web portal, NEMAR, to OpenNeuro data for human electrophysiology data (EEG and MEG) and for intracranial (iEEG) data recorded from clinical patients during planning for brain surgery or other therapies – we here refer to these as neuroelectromagnetic (NEM) data. NEMAR, maintained at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, acts as a portal to NEM data shared publicly via the OpenNeuro data archive. Upon receipt by OpenNeuro, NEM data are copied to NEMAR and made available for processing without charge on the ACCESS high-performance computing resources of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) via the Neuroscience Gateway (NSG) project. NEMAR offers a search engine for NEM data whose results can be inspected in detail from a web browser, including visualizations of data from each subject plus a number of data activity measures and quality estimates. A forum for each dataset records visitors’ comments and lists papers citing the data. Next, we will build large, multimodal foundational deep neural network models allowing users to explore relationships between NEM signal brain dynamics, experience, and behavior.