Section: New Results

Management of Information in Neuroimaging

Participants : Michael Kain, Olivier Commowick, Elise Bannier, Inès Fakhfakh, Justine Guillaumont, Florent Leray, Yao Yao, Christian Barillot.

The major topic that is addressed in this period concern the sharing of data and processing tools in neuroimaging (through the “Programme d’Investissement d’Avenir” project such as OFSEP and FLI-IAM) which led to build a suitable architecture to share images and processing tools, started from the NeuroBase project (supported by the French Ministry of Research). Our overall goal within these projects is to set up a computer infrastructure to facilitate the sharing of neuroimaging data, as well as image processing tools, in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. These consortium gathered expertise coming from several complementary domains of expertise: image processing in neuroimaging, workflows and GRID computing, ontology development and ontology-based mediation. This enables a large variety of users to diffuse, exchange or reach neuroimaging information with appropriate access means, in order to be able to retrieve information almost as easily as if the data were stored locally by means of the "cloud computing" Storage as a Service (SaaS) concept As an example, the Shanoir environment has been succesfully deployed to the Neurinfo platform were it is routinely used to manage images of the research studies. It is also currently being deployed for two large projets: OFSEP ("Observatoire Français de la Sclérose en Plaques") where up to 30000 patients will be acquired on a ten years frame, and the Image Analysis and Mangment (IAM) node of the France Life Imaging national infrastructure (FLI-IAM). Our team fulfills multiple roles in this nation-wide FLI project. Christian Barillot is the chair of the IAM node, Olivier Commowick is participating in the working group workflow and image processing and Michael Kain is the technical manager of the node. Apart from the team members, software solutions like medInria and Shanoir are part of the final software platform.