Function BIRN users should go to their community page for specific information about using this capability: https://wiki.birncommunity.org:8443/display/BIRNDOC/Function+BIRN.

BIRN is also happy to open the new BIRN Documentation site to the public. This site publishes documentation on mature capabilities for BIRN communities as well as the biomedical community at large. This is a test release for a few weeks and feedback is encouraged:

https://wiki.birncommunity.org:8443/display/BIRNDOC/

Please contact us at support@birncommunity.org if you have any questions or suggestions.

• E-poster presentation titled Multi-site Investigation of DTI Reproducibility by  K. G. Helmer, M-C. Chou, A. Song, J. Turner, B. Gimi, and S. Mori.
• Lecture for the Weekday Educational Course titled “How to do a Functional Multi-Center Neuroimaging Study” by Bryon Mueller
• Foundations for Multi-site MRI by Gary Glover

You can find more information about the conference itself here: http://www.ismrm.org/10/index.htm

http://nrg.wikispaces.com/2010+XNAT+Workshop

Thanks to everyone who attended!

The CTSN works from within BIRN to extend BIRN services to research communities outside of the original BIRN testbeds. The CTSN is charged with ensuring the smooth integration of tools developed within the BIRN testbeds to BIRN’s evolving data management and infrastructure capabilities. Through this grant, the expertise gained by the testbeds will provide support for other groups wishing to establish a research network.

The co-principal investigators of the CTSN are: Steven G. Potkin, M.D., professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California at Irvine and the principal investigator of the Function BIRN testbed; Bruce R. Rosen, M.D., Ph.D., professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and of health sciences and technology at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, as well as principal investigator of the Morphometry BIRN testbed; and Arthur W. Toga, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Neurology, associate vice provost at the University of California at Los Angeles, and an associate dean of the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and principal investigator of the Mouse BIRN testbed.

The site displays new partnerships with key research organizations in cardiology and primate research, and emphasizes that BIRN offers assistance to biomedical research groups and consortia of all sizes and biomedical research specialties. It also conveys BIRN’s shift to from a hardware-based to a software-based infrastructure that enables users to connect across geographic and/or diverse, incompatible computing systems.

A slide presentation by BIRN co-Principal Investigator (PI) Carl Kesselman, Ph.D., describing the new thrust is available here. Other co-PIs are:

• Ian Foster, Ph.D., a co-father of Grid computing with Kesselman and director of the Computation Institute, a joint project of the University of Chicago (UC) and Argonne National Laboratory;
• Steven G. Potkin, M.D., a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of California at Irvine, and leader of the initial Function BIRN testbed to share MRI images recorded at different sites;
• Bruce R. Rosen, M.D., Ph.D., professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and of health sciences and technology at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, as well as leader of the initial Morphometry BIRN testbed to pool and analyze data across neuroimaging sites;
• Jonathan C. Silverstein, M.D., associate director and senior fellow at the Computation Institute; and
• Arthur W. Toga, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Neurology, associate vice provost at the University of California at Los Angeles, and an associate dean of the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

Other Executive Committee Members are:

• Michael T. Marron, Ph.D., Director of NCRR’s Division of Biomedical Technology; and
• Liming Yang, Ph.D., health scientist administrator for NCRR’s Division of Biomedical Technology.

……………….

BIRN is a national initiative to advance biomedical research through data sharing and online collaboration. Funded by the National Center for Research Resources, a unit of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), BIRN provides data-sharing infrastructure, software tools, strategies and advisory services to individual biomedical research users and user groups.

BIRN is a collaborative effort between NCRR and a leadership consortium that includes the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Chicago, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California at Irvine, and University of California at Los Angeles. Participants represent some of the nation’s premier technical and healthcare research universities, hospitals and other institutions, ranging from small research groups to large, well-established research consortia

The relationship will help CVRG, an $8.5 million (federal funding) digital network, to fulfill its mission of creating a software grid through which researchers worldwide can  easily exchange data, images and expertise on heart-related illnesses. Based at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, the CVRG aims to use digital tools to find new ways to prevent, detect and treat life-threatening cardiac ailments.

The initiative will enable CVRG to use computational resources more efficiently, evaluate multiple analytical algorithms simultaneously, and save time by avoiding redundancies in analytic workflows.  Components will include leveraging BIRN’s competencies with the Taverna workflow management software to orchestrate CVRG web services based workflows better.

In addition, BIRN will assist with data integration of the CVRG imaging platform.  BIRN will tap its capabilities in information integration research, including the USC Information Sciences Institute’s world-class artificial intelligence expertise, and its close partnership with the Open Grid Services Architecture Data Access and Integration service (OGSA-DAI).

Benefits to CVRG will include a comprehensive view of multi-modal data and metadata repositories, including primary data from scanners, derived data, data produced by analytics algorithms, and metadata.

Funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH, the CVRG supports national and international multi-institutional collaborations in cardiovascular science, and builds on and extends tools developed in the caBIG and BIRN data-sharing infrastructure projects.  Directed by the Institute for Computational Medicine at Johns Hopkins, the CVRG also includes the Center for Comprehensive informatics at Emory University. Dr. Raimond Winslow, PI of the CVRG Project says “We are delighted to announce this research partnership with BIRN, and know that it will contribute to the efforts of the CVRG to advance our understanding of the causes and treatment of heart disease, the leading cause of mortality in the U.S.”

BIRN is a national initiative to advance biomedical research through data sharing and online collaboration.  Funded by the National Center for Research Resources, a unit of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), BIRN provides data-sharing infrastructure, software tools, strategies and advisory services to individual biomedical research users and user groups.

BIRN is a collaborative effort between NCRR and a consortium that includes the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI), University of Chicago, Massachusetts General Hospital, University of California at Irvine, and University of California at Los Angeles.  Participants represent some of the nation’s premier technical and healthcare research universities, hospitals and other institutions, ranging from small research groups to large, well-established research consortia.