NSF PR 01-21 - March 22, 2001

Media contact:

Dave Vannier

(703) 292-8070

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Program contact:

Steve Breckler

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This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.

Brain Image Database Benefits Research and Education Worldwide

Brain scans are an important tool for medical science, basic research and education, but this expensive technology is often out of reach for many institutions. Now a team at Dartmouth College has developed a repository for images of human brain scans that is available free to researchers and educators worldwide.

The National Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data Center was established with a grant of $4.7 million over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The scientific research and education community recently gained access to the first data sets, which are made available by Dartmouth on CD-ROMs.

The fMRI Data Center will be featured March 26 at the 2001 annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in New York City.

"Computational tools were essential to the triumph of the human genome project, and we want to bring this power into brain research," says Michael Gazzaniga, director of Dartmouth's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. "The fMRI Data Center provides a valuable service for students, scholars and researchers of brain function."

The goal of Gazzaniga and colleagues has been to overcome the high cost of fMRI technology and the lack of a common data standard. The brain images come from fMRI results published in peer-reviewed journals. Once the data are received, all traces of personal identity information are removed and the image files are converted into a standard format.

The fMRI Data Center relies on a multidisciplinary team of cognitive neuroscientists, computer scientists, psychologists, and mathematicians. For example, Dartmouth computer scientists Javed Aslam and Daniel Rockmore are developing sophisticated search engines and image analysis tools to allow researchers to fully scrutinize the brain scans. These tools will also enable a new analysis of fMRI data that have already been collected and published.

"The fMRI Data Center not only provides the tools to make the most of available data, but it also stimulates dialogue across the scientific community," says Steve Breckler, NSF's acting director for cognitive neuroscience. "Researchers and educators with modest budgets will now have access to recent fMRI data."

For the fMRI Data Center, see: http://www.fmridc.org/

Editors Notes:
Dartmouth Media Contact:
Sue Knapp
(603) 646-3661/[email protected]

The fMRI Data Center will be featured in a presentation at the 2001 annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in New York City, Monday March 26 at 5:30pm in the New York Marriott World Trade Center.


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