Chapter 8 - Medical Data Federation: The Biomedical Informatics Research Network

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a project aimed at federating biomedical imaging data. The National Institute of Health (NIH) is pioneering the use of Grid infrastructure for medical research and patient care through the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) project. BIRN is deploying compute-storage clusters at research and clinical sites around the United States and is deploying Grid middleware to enable the integration of image data from multiple locations for the purposes of research and, ultimately, improved clinical care. It is developing and evolving the hardware, software, and protocols necessary to share and mine data for both basic and clinical research. The development of BIRN is driven by three neuroimaging testbed activities: (1) studying disease states and relationships to human brain morphology (Human Structure BIRN), (2) functional imaging analysis of schizophrenia (FIRST BIRN), and (3) multiscale analysis of mouse models of disease (Mouse BIRN). Each testbed serves as a guide for the development of a persistent infrastructure to facilitate collaborative biomedical research across multiple disciplines.