The Human Brain Project: Funding
The UW Human Brain Project is funded by Human Brain Project grant RO1 MH/DC02310, co funded for the period 8/1/02-7/31/07 by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The title is "Structural information framework for brain mapping" , principal investigator Jim Brinkley. Initial funding was also provided by the National Library of Medicine.
Abstract. For competitive renewal, awarded 8/1/02
The past decades have seen a proliferation of techniques for studying
the functioning of the living human brain, and one area of neuroscience that
has particularly benefited is the study of language. Methods such as PET, EEG,
MEG, single cell recording and cortical stimulation mapping (CSM) are providing
increasing insight about language function. However, each method shows a different
aspect of functional activation, often leading to seemingly contradictory measurements.
What is needed are methods for integrating and visualizing these diverse forms
of data as a first step towards computational models of language function. Yet
it is impossible and redundant for a single lab to collect all the data themselves
in order to make these comparisons, and it is currently very difficult to obtain
comparable data from other labs, both because of technical factors such as anatomical
variation and non-standardization of language task protocols, and because of
sociological factors relating to privacy and intellectual property.
In this proposal we address these needs by extending and generalizing methods we have developed to organize neurosurgical language data for a single lab around a neuroanatomical framework. We will 1) develop a spatio-temporal experiment management system (STEMS) that handles complex multi-resolution brain map data, 2) develop methods for both humans and computers to interact with the database, including 3-D visualization of spatio-temporal results, and 3) develop methods for peer-to-peer sharing of independently maintained spatio-temporal experiment management systems.
Our hypothesis is that this "bottom-up" approach of developing STEMSs
for individual labs, then interconnecting them in a peer-to-peer database, is
a viable approach to achieving a goal of the Human Brain Project to develop
interoperable databases of raw neuroscience data. We will test this hypothesis
by building at least two such STEMSs, and assessing their utility, both alone
and in combination, in generating neuroscience results that would not have been
easily generated without them.