A GRID-BASED e-INFRASTRUCTUREFOR DATA ARCHIVING/COMMUNICATION

AND COMPUTATIONALLY INTENSIVE APPLICATIONSIN THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

Project acronym: neuGRIDProject type: I3 Deployment of e-infrastructure

Coordinator: Giovanni B. Frisoni

Version 2.1 April 2009 - Achievements of year 1 of 3

Partners

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Advisory Board

International Cooperation

Giovanni B FrisoniIRCCS Fatebenefratelli, Brescia, Italy

David MansetMAAT Gknowledge, Toledo, Spain

Christian SpengerProdema Informatics AG, Bronschofen, Switzerland

Frederick BarkhofVUmc, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Yannick LegréHealthGrid, Pont-duChateau, France

University of theWest of England

Richard McClatcheyUniversity of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Lar-Olof WahlundKarolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Carla FinocchiaroCFc consulting, Milano, Italy

Paul Thompson, Lab of NeuroImaging, UCLAAlan Evans, MNI, McGill University, Montreal

Bruno Dubois, P.I. of IFRAD and INSERM, ParisJohn Geddes, P.I. of UK MRC project NeuroGrid

John Ashburner, Wellcome Trust Centre for NeuroimagingMassimo Filippi, IRCCS and University San Raffaele, Milan, ItalyPhilip Scheltens, European Federation of Neurological Societies

Simon Lovestone, P.I. Of AddNeuroMed, King’s College London, IoPJohan Montagnat, CNRS France, NeuroLOG co-Principal Investigator

Bengt Winblad, European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (EADC) co-P.I.Salvator Roberto Amendolia, Scientific Attachè, Italian Embassy in LondonAnthony Gamst, Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), UCSD

Maria Carrillo, Director, Medical and Scientific Relations, Alzheimer’s AssociationBruno Vellas, European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (EADC) Principal Investigator

Gunhild Waldemar, European Federation of Neurological Societies representatives (EFNS)

Start date: 01.02.2008 Duration: 36 months Funding from the EC: € 2.800.000 Web site: www.neugrid.eu

Contact: Giovanni B. Frisoniemail: gfrisoni@fatebenefratelli.it

tel.: +39 030 3501261fax.: +39 030 3501313

This project has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n°211714

(http://cbrain.mcgill.ca) is a network of Canada’s five leading brain imaging

research centres, linked within a Service Oriented Architecture for distributed processing and data-basing of brain imaging information. Like neuGRID, CBRAIN is using LORIS for data storage/ communi-cation and the CIVET cortical thickness extraction pipeline as a test case software application. LORIS has been developed at the ACE NeuroImaging Lab at McConnell Brain Imaging Center (BIC) of Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), thanks to the support of the National Institute of Health (NIH).CBRAIN, scheduled for completion in 2011, will take advantage of Canada’s national High Perfor-mance Computing Grid network, wherein seven regional HPC consortia, representing 61 institu-tions, are linked via CANARIE in support of distributed HPC applications (https://computecanada.org). The Principal Investigator is Alan Evans at Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill Univer-sity, Montreal.

(http://www.LONI.ucla.edu) is a large research infras-tructure at UCLA hosting the largest research imaging database worldwide in the field of neurodegenerative disorders (i.e. US, Japanese, and Australian Alzheimer’s Disease NeuroImaging Initiatives - ADNIs) amounting to about 12.000 brain studies. Thanks to the LONI Workflow Management application, Neuroscientists can easily build new pipelines and access a wide range of algorithms ena-bling functional and morphometric analyses. The Principal Investigator is Arthur Toga.

is a prospective multi-centre study of Alzheimer’s Disease. AddNeuroMed has studied 900 persons at baseline and collected 2,500 brain imaging

studies. Notably, these will be fully compatible with the ADNI images. The Principal Investigator is Simon Lovestone from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London in the UK.

CBRAIN

LONI – Laboratory of NeuroImaging

AddNeuroMed

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The Infrastructurene

uGR

IDWhat is neuGRID

User Communities

Use CaseA new user-friendly Grid-based e-In-frastructure enabling the neuroscience community to collect and archive large amounts of imaging data and to access re-sources for computationally intensive data

analyses.Neuroscientists will be able to identify neuro-degenerative di-sease markers through the analysis of brain images and thanks to an innovative new set of distributed medical and Grid services. The in-frastructure is designed to be ex-pandable to other medical applica-tions and is compliant with EU and international standards for data collection, data management and Grid technologies abstraction.

Neuroscientists working in the field of Alzhei-mer’s disease will have an integrated clinical and imaging database, coupled with algorithm mana-gement interfaces.Algorithm Developers will have a powerful test-bed as well as access to a large community of neuroscientists that might exploit their products.Pharma Industries will be able to test disease markers for use as surrogate outcomes in clinical trials of drugs for neurodegenerative diseases.

Specific attention has been devoted to data protection and data safety under the following case scenarios. SCENARIO A: clinical data/images collected from subjects specifically enrolled to be entered in the neuGRID infrastructure SCENARIO B.1: clinical data/images previously collected in different research projects are archived in neuGRID SCENARIO B.2: clinical data/images previously collected in different research projects are analyzed but not archived in neuGRID

Data Protection and Safety in neuGRID

A researcher interacts with neuGRID to select a group of images to process using their chosen pipeline. After pro-cessing on the grid is complete, provenance data is used to verify the output and the results are exported into the user’s tools for statistical analysis and advanced visualization.

In neuGRID, a gLite-based dedicated Grid network is being deployed which will provide hundreds of CPUs paired with Terabytes of storage capacity.

Through the so-called Data Archi-ving and Computing Sites – DACS, additional resources such as lo-cal clusters and supercomputers will be attached and shared in the infrastructure.

End-users will thus access a potenti-ally unlimited pool of computing resources

to run large imaging and statistical analyses over the distributed database of standardized data.

Level 0 provides the core services of the Infrastructure ranging from the Grid Information System to neuGRID’s data-base management facilities. Level 1 hosts the concrete computing resources in use by neuroscientists when acquiring data, specifying pipelines and testing new markers of brain diseases.

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DACS1 DACS2 DACS3

NewMarkers

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