Neuroimaging plays a large role in our pursuit of the understanding of behavior and cognition in health and disease. The past decade has seen the emergence of a wealth of resources that support this pursuit. The increasing complexity of this landscape of resources necessitates the development of resource management systems to support researchers in navigating this big data environment.
The Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC) is a neuroimaging informatics knowledge environment for structural and functional imaging, clinical neuroinformatics, genomics and computational neuroscience. Initiated in 2006 through the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, NITRCs mission is to foster a user-friendly knowledge environment for the neuroinformatics community.
NITRC is comprised of three integrated services. The NITRC-Resources website (nitrc.org) facilitates the finding of software and data. To support the need for expanded data hosting, the NITRC Image Registry (NITRC-IR) provides a data sharing solution. Once a user finds software and data, local processing is likely to become rate limiting as the magnitude of the shared datasets gets larger. This prompted the development of the NITRC Computational Environment (NITRC-CE), a cloud-based, high-performance, computational platform tailored to the needs of the NITRC community.
In this presentation, we will review the general functionality of the NITRC suite of services and explore the applications of these tools to example cognitive and behavioral questions as supported by various neuroimaging initiatives. Integrating data from the '1000 Functional Connectomes' project, the Autism Brain Image Data Exchange (ABIDE), the National Database for Autism Research (NDAR) and the Pediatric Imaging, Neurocognition and Genetics (PING) projects, as examples, will highlight the utility of these approaches in integrating many disparate information sources in support of a unified analytic strategy.