What is BIRN?
The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is a geographically distributed virtual community of shared resources offering tremendous potential to advance the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
BIRN enhances the scientific discoveries of biomedical scientists and clinical researchers across research disciplines.
BIRN ...
- hosts a collaborative environment rich with tools that permit uniform access to hundreds of researchers, enabling cooperation on multi-institutional investigations.
- synchronizes developments in wide area networking, multiple data sources, and distributed computing.
- designs, tests, and releases new integrative software tools that enable researchers to pose questions and share knowledge across multiple animal models (mouse, human, and non-human primate).
- receives funding from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources (NCRR), established in 2001.
What Does BIRN Offer?
Cyberinfrastructure: BIRN’s cyberinfrastructure consists of a cohesive implementation of key information technologies and applications specifically designed to support biomedical scientists in conducting their research. The widespread adoption of the BIRN’s cyberinfrastructure is allowing investigators to virtually pool their data, share common resources and conduct research studies through the BIRN collaborative environment.
Tools: The BIRN offers a diverse array of software resources and tools for the biomedical community. BIRN is committed to developing and sharing these software tools to support the advancement of data acquisition protocols, data analysis, data management, and universal practices in collaborative and multi-site research. We are committed to an open source policy and all software downloaded from BIRN is made available without unreasonable restrictions, as dictated in our Software License.
Data: The BIRN Data Repository (BDR) is a sustainable archive of data that will accept data generated by the biomedical research community and make this data freely available for sharing and exchange. Initially, the BDR will house publicly accessible biomedical imaging data with descriptive metadata, and in some cases associated clinical, genetic, or other biomedical data. The BDR will provide researchers with a venue to share and exchange their data with the broader biomedical research community, providing the means by which to capture, curate, store, query, view, and download imaging and related data.
Data Integration: The BIRN research community deals not only with large distributed databases, but also with highly heterogeneous sets of data. A query may need to span several relational databases, ontology references, spatial atlases, and collections of information extracted from image files. To that end, the BIRN-CC has deployed a data integration environment that enables researchers to submit these multi-source queries and to navigate freely between distributed databases. This environment is flexible, scalable, and powerful. It allows individual researchers to manage their own data in databases tailored to meet their specific needs. Those searching the BIRN system, however, will see the collection of federated databases as if it were a single database.
Ontology: In order to enable enhanced data sharing, a BIRN-wide effort to develop and apply biomedical ontologies is underway. Ontologies include computer-usable definitions of basic biological concepts and the relationships among them. Ontologies enhance the reuse of knowledge by providing a systematic framework for encoding knowledge within and across domains. In order to reduce the complexity of working with multiple ontologies, and to ensure coverage of BIRN-relevant vocabulary, BIRN has developed BIRNLex, a controlled lexicon for annotating BIRN data sources. The on-going development of BIRNLex continues in collaboration with other biomedical ontology development efforts related to biological, biomedical, and imaging-based data.
Multi-Site Collaboration: BIRN is developing the tools and infrastructure that fosters large-scale collaborations in biomedical science. By intertwining concurrent revolutions occurring in biomedicine and information technology, BIRN is enabling researchers to participate in large scale, cross-institutional research studies where they are able to acquire, share, analyze, mine and interpret both imaging and clinical data acquired at multiple sites using advanced processing and visualization tools.
How is BIRN Organized?
The BIRN currently consists of four test beds, supported by the BIRN Coordinating Center (BIRN CC). Test bed science drives the continual development of BIRN infrastructure and resources. While BIRN’s current research projects are targeting questions in neuroscience, the BIRN infrastructure and collaborative tools are suitable to support a wide array of clinical or scientific research questions.
- 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.
Each BIRN test bed is managed by three Key Personnel; the project manager, the scientific coordinator, and the principle investigator (PI). BIRN-wide policy and strategy is the responsibility of BIRN's Executive Committee (BEC). The BEC is comprised of the principal investigators of each test bed plus officers of NIH's NCRR; together they implement BIRN-wide policy and priorities. In addition, several BIRN-wide Task Forces have been convened to address issues that cut across BIRN research groups, such as the Ontology Task Force.
Who Uses BIRN?
The BIRN is continuously adding new participants from public and private research centers and hospitals in the United States and beyond. A list of current participating institutions is available. If you want to access more information about BIRN's publicly released software tools and data, consult BIRN Tools & BIRN Data Repository for more information.
BIRN Test Beds:
BIRN Coordinating Center
Brain Morphometry BIRN
Function BIRN
Mouse BIRN
Projects using the BIRN Infrastructure
National Database for Autism Research (NDAR)
NDAR is a collaborative biomedical informatics system tasked to provide a national resource to support and accelerate research in autism by supporting large-scale, multi-site projects as well as pilot studies and basic science investigations.
Collaborating Projects
National Alliance for Medical Imaging Computing (NA-MIC)
NA-MIC’s goal is to develop, integrate, and deploy computational image analysis systems to multiple diseases, in different organs. NA-MIC is dedicated to the advancement of medical image computing with a goal of making a broad and significant impact on experimental, clinical, and behavioral research.
National e-Science Centre (NeSC)
The mission of the e-Science Centre is to stimulate the creation of new insights in e-Science and computing science by providing the "reactor vessel and catalysts" which bring together international experts and encourage them to successfully address significant and diverse challenges.
How Can I Find Out More About BIRN?
To find out more about individual BIRN projects, please contact the Key Personnel of the project which interests you. For a more general view of BIRN, including opportunities for participation, please contact the NIH-NCRR BIRN Program Officer, Greg Farber.