NIMH Awards $4.6M to UC San Diego for NEMAR IT Infrastructure, Tools

By Fred Donovan

September 23, 2019 - The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded $4.6 million to the University of California San Diego to build IT infrastructure and tools to add human neuroelectromagnetic brain imaging to the Neuroelectromagnetic Data Archive and Tools Resource (NEMAR).

The NEMAR project is part of the public-private BRAIN initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health.

NEMAR will serve as a portal or gateway to the OpenNeuro data archive, which is an open platform for scientists to upload and share neuroimaging data. The data It will be added to the OpenNeuro archive after NEMAR software evaluates the data quality and the completeness of its documentation. Datasets can then be analyzed by other researchers who log in.

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NIMH has designed OpenNeuro as a repository for BRAIN Initiative project data as well as other types of human neuroimaging data. Currently, workflows only exist for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. As a result, if other types of brain scans were uploaded to OpenNeuro, there is no data analysis infrastructure.

"This level of cutting-edge multidisciplinary research collaboration is what UC San Diego is known for," said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. "NEMAR has the potential to deepen the scope of data science, clinical research and patient care. Combining the expertise and insight of neuroscientists and computer scientists is one way we are advancing the frontiers of knowledge and discovering new ways to enhance lives everywhere."

Using the Brain Imaging Data Standard and Hierarchical Event Descriptor standards, datasets uploaded through the portal will be formatted uniformly. This will enable scientists to apply new statistical machine-learning methods to uncover hidden patterns that can only be discovered by looking through big quantities of data, resulting in fresh insights into fundamental and clinical brain research.

The project will also provide OpenNeuro users with data visualization tools. NEMAR will use the Neuroscience Gateway (NSG), operated by the National Science Foundation-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), a national supercomputer network. SDSC is home to Comet, a petascale supercomputer capable of 2 quadrillion operations per second and part of XSEDE.

NSG users may also be able to operate on OpenNeuro information transported to SDSC’s XSEDE resources using a high-bandwidth pipe between SDSC and cloud computing providers such as Amazon. To enable further processing, a copy of the neuroelectromagnetic data archived in OpenNeuro may be stored at SDSC.

“NEMAR will help us learn more about how brain dynamics support thought and action and can therefore be a catalyst for advancing brain science and clinical brain research," said Scott Makeig, director of the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience and principal investigator on the grant.

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NIMH Awards $4.6M to UC San Diego for NEMAR IT Infrastructure, Tools

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded $4.6 million to the University of California San Diego to build IT infrastructure and tools to add human neuroelectromagnetic brain imaging to the Neuroelectromagnetic Data Archive and Tools Resource (NEMAR).

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