The Clinical Value of Large Neuroimaging Data Sets in Alzheimer's Disease

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New era of collaborative, interdisciplinary team science

The ongoing convergence and integration of neuroscientific infrastructures worldwide is heading to the creation of a global virtual imaging laboratory. Through ordinary Web browsers, large-scale image data sets and related clinical data and biospecimens, algorithm pipelines, computational resources, and visualization and statistical toolkits are easily accessible to users regardless of their physical location or disciplinary orientation. The promise of this investigatory

Impact of key areas of e-science on neuroscience and neurology

Multisite neuroimaging studies are dramatically accelerating the pace and volume of discoveries regarding major brain disease and the contrasts between normal and abnormal brain structure and function.14 The large-scale, purpose-driven data sets generated by these consortia can then be used by the broader community to model and predict clinical outcomes as well as guide clinicians in selecting treatment options for various neurologic diseases. Multisite trials are an important element in the

Data integration

A subset of data from the clinical database is also integrated into the IDA to support richer multimodal queries across the combined set (Fig. 3). The selection of the initial set of clinical data elements was based on user surveys in which participants identified the elements they believed would be most useful in supporting their investigations. Because the clinical data originate in an external database, automated methods for obtaining and integrating the external data also validate and

Infrastructure mechanics

A robust and reliable infrastructure is a necessity for supporting a resource intended to serve a global scientific community. The hardware infrastructure of the informatics core provides high performance, security, and reliability at each level. The fault-tolerant network infrastructure has no single points of failure. A firewall appliance protects and segments the network traffic, permitting only authorized ingress and egress. Multiple redundant database, application, and Web servers ensure

Summary

Given the vagaries of disease modification and of what will eventually prove a valid, reliable, and compelling empiric basis for distinguishing between true disease modification and symptomatic treatment effects, ADNI investigators are bringing multimodal neuroimaging techniques to the cutting edge of usefulness as dynamic biomarkers, sensitive to disease state and progression across different stages.18, 33, 63 From here, the next step is neuroimages as reliable treatment trial end points and

Acknowledgments

The original work was primarily funded by the ADNI (Principal Investigator: Michael Weiner; National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant number U01 AG024904). ADNI is funded by the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, through generous contributions from the following companies and organizations: Pfizer Inc, Wyeth Research, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline,

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