Biomedical Informatics

The Department is at the forefront of development and deployment of advanced networking and data-mining technologies in biomedical and clinical research. Through the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) initiative, funded by the NIH National Center for Research Resources, UCSD neuroscientists are coordinating the efforts of a nationwide consortium of universities to establish a first of its kind large-scale system of federated databases to study neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders of the brain.

The BIRN biogrid is enabling a new mode of cross-disciplinary collaboration in which researchers inter-institutionally linked over the high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet2 can distribute, integrate, and access high-resolution digital magnetic resonance images and advanced 3D microscope images of animal and human brains for comprehensive analysis and comparison at many different scales, from the molecular and cellular to the whole brain, across different computational models. These new capabilities in cross-institutional integration of neuroimaging data, and related genomic, structural, and gene expression data, hold great promise for the development of new and better treatments for brain-related diseases such as multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

Research

Mark H. Ellisman, PhD
Maryann E. Martone, PhD
Gina E. Sosinsky, PhD