Brainscape is a database for resting state functional connectivity studies. Functional connectivity has shown tremendous promise in mapping the intrinsic functional topography of the brain, evaluating neuroanatomical models, and investigating neurological and psychiatric disease. Brainscape includes a repository of public and private data and an analysis engine for exploring the correlation structure of spontaneous fluctuations in the fMRI BOLD signal
However, the part that really got me excited was listening to Prof. Daniel Marcus describe Brainscape and how they are using EC2 and S3 in the video from the startup challenge. As he says, the field is moving from unwieldy software/hardware combo’s to lightweight web apps using Amazon’s services as the backbone, S3 to hold images, EC2 to scale up computations. The data size and volume is quite large here, and it was interesting to note how many of the startup challenge finalists were video companies. As we move Bioscreencast to take advantage of S3 one of questions has always been, how will this impact performance? I think we’ll know very soon as S3 goes from being just a cool backend to one driving large scale, high bandwidth commercial apps.
Web as platform: Brain Imaging
Everything is right about Brainscape, a product of the Neuroinformatics Research Group and the Neuroimaging Laboratories at Washington University in St. Louis. All database and analysis tools are open source and freely available. XNAT (image below) is their open source platform to facilitate management and exploration of neuroimaging data. The platform is worth a post in itself, but for now you can read the paper.
However, the part that really got me excited was listening to Prof. Daniel Marcus describe Brainscape and how they are using EC2 and S3 in the video from the startup challenge. As he says, the field is moving from unwieldy software/hardware combo’s to lightweight web apps using Amazon’s services as the backbone, S3 to hold images, EC2 to scale up computations. The data size and volume is quite large here, and it was interesting to note how many of the startup challenge finalists were video companies. As we move Bioscreencast to take advantage of S3 one of questions has always been, how will this impact performance? I think we’ll know very soon as S3 goes from being just a cool backend to one driving large scale, high bandwidth commercial apps.
Technorati Tags: Brainscape, Amazon Web Services, EC2, S3, Neuroscience, Imaging