BIRN Multi-site Collaborations
The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) was launched in 2001 with the goal of fostering large-scale collaborations in biomedical science by utilizing emerging cyberinfrastructure. An essential feature of the project is the collaboration of computer scientists and biomedical researchers from different research disciplines. Together, our goal is to design and implement a distributed architecture of shared resources usable by all biomedical researchers in order to advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Why have multi-site collaborations?
- Multi-site collaborations allow larger sample sizes and more representative populations to be collected thereby increasing the statistical power of the study.
- Multi-site studies allow the quantification of the effects of using different hardware and software to acquire the same types of data. This information is critically important to others seeking to use the results of the study.
- Multi-site collaborations bring together complementary areas of expertise that can be used to address a research or technical issue in a unique, powerful, and novel approach.
What can multi-site collaborations provide the rest of the scientific community?
- Data sharing: Multi-site collaborations can develop data sharing infrastructure and policies making legacy and future data sets available to the broader scientific community.
- Interoperability: Multi-site collaborations can encourage the interoperability of analysis tools developed in different laboratories. .
- Benchmarks: Multi-site collaborations can lead to the development of standards ranging from new data formats to acquisition and analysis protocols. These help move the field forward by establishing benchmarks for the field.
- Synergies: Multi-site collaborations can foster synergies that lead to results greater than what individual sites could produce. The combination of the strengths of each site can provide a deeper resource pool than those available at each site.
What multi-site collaborations make up BIRN?
- BIRN Coordinating Center (BCC) maintains and develops the hardware infrastructure for the BIRN Test Beds..
- Brain Morphometry Test Bed focuses on understanding the issues involved in performing multi-site structural and DTI imaging studies in human populations, the recommendation of protocols that can be used across platforms and the interoperability of analysis tools and database software used in these studies.
- Function BIRN Test Bed focuses on methods for prospective, multi-site clinical functional imaging studies in human populations.
- Mouse BIRN Test Bed focuses on multi-site, multi-technique, and multi-scale integration of imaging and gene expression data in mouse models of neurodegenerative disease.
What tools exist to facilitate multi-site collaboration?
Each of the BIRN test beds have developed tools to address their collaboration needs. The tools fall into the following categories:
Are these tools useful for individual sites?
- Most emphatically yes. In any human or animal biological study, with or without imaging, having tools for standardized data collection, quality assurance and analysis, long-term storage and sharing with the wider research community is essential. Many of these tools have been successfully used at a single site. In addition, the adoption of these tools by the larger community allows for easier interoperability and integration in the future. It also allows for the development of analysis standards by the scientific community.
- Any site with long term research programs may have to deal with equipment upgrades, software changes, and methodological improvements over time. Multi-site collaborations deal with these issues on a day-to-day basis. Comparing data collected across differing equipment, software, and protocols is the challenge that multi-site collaborations face. The tools developed to address these challenges can be applied by a single site to make its data more usable longitudinally.