Data

One of the goals of the BIRN is to promote the sharing of data.  By reusing data, researchers can increase the size of the populations in study groups and thereby search for smaller and smaller disease effects.  The reuse of data however, requires that inter-site effects and artifacts be minimized so that the full benefit of combining data from different sites is obtained.

To this end, both the Brain Morphometry BIRN (MBIRN) and the Brain Function BIRN (fBIRN), have conducted studies on the causes and effects of inter-site variation.  The Mouse BIRN also has a variety of imaging data available and has built atlasing tools that allow the registration of different types of imaging data.  The data from these studies are available to the scientific community for use as calibration or comparison data, for reuse in a separate study, or as input data for the testing of new analysis or processing tools.

How to cite BIRN: If you use any of the following data for your project, please cite the appropriate NIH/NIGMS grant numbers in the Acknowledgement section of the manuscript:

  • U24-RR021992 Function Biomedical Informatics Research Network (FBIRN)
  • U24 RR021382 Morphometry Biomedical Informatics Research Network (MBIRN)
  • U24-RR021760 Mouse Biomedical Informatics Research Network

Each usage should also cite:

  • U24 GM104203 Bio-Informatics Research Network Coordinating Center (BIRN-CC)

Example:

Some of the data used in this study was acquired through and provided by the Biomedical Informatics Research Network under the following support: U24-RR021992, Function BIRN (for functional data) and U24 GM104203, Bio-Informatics Research Network Coordinating Center (BIRN-CC).

List of Data by Category

Human Functional Imaging Data

The following are large and diverse datasets collected as part of the MBIRN and FBIRN collaboratories and throughout clinical imaging communities at large.

fMRI Calibration Data (Agar Phantom)

Structural Brain Imaging Data

Researchers can use structural imaging data sets to discover correlations between the volume of certain brain structures and disease. The effects are usually subtle and large numbers of subjects are often needed to identify correlations. Several groups connected with BIRN have conducted such studies on populations throughout the adult age range and including specific disease populations. In addition, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is becoming an important part of structural imaging studies. With this technique, one can visualize tissue whose structure is ordered. One application is to study brain white matter, which consists of oriented fibers. BIRN also provides below a DTI data set from a single subject that can be used to build up data with increasing of signal-to-noise ratio or simply used as test data for processing or analysis software.

Cell Centered Database

  • Cell Centered Database (CCDB)

    The CCDB is an Internet databases for cellular imaging data. The CCDB houses structural and protein distribution information derived from confocal, electron microscopy and multiphoton microscopy.

Mouse Atlases

MouseBIRN has made available several multimodal digital atlases:

BIRN is supported by NIH grants 1U24-RR025736, U24-RR021992, U24-RR021760 and by the Collaborative Tools Support Network Award 1U24-RR026057-01.