fMRI Data Center
So far, we have a gold mine and an attic. Next we look at psychology's brain, or at least a site where there are a lot of brain images that psychologists ought to be looking at. The functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data Center at Dartmouth College (www.fmridc.org) is one or our newer datasets. Thanks to a substantial grant from the National Science Foundation, the fMRI Data Center opened its virtual doors in the autumn of 1999. A team led by psychologist Michael Gazzaniga, one of our foremost cognitive neuroscientists, operates the Center.
The Center presents a fascinating case study for those who would build a database with very large storage needs. In the heady, early days of thinking about the Center, it was believed that it should house the brain images from all the top neuroscience journals.
And maybe it shall. But not immediately.
Right now the core of the Center's collection consists of the data underlying the 13 fMRI studies published in the special supplement to the November 2000 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Make no mistake; these data are the core of a collection that will grow steadily. But one of the things the database wizards have found is that to store neurological images, the space required is not to be measured in mere megabytes, nor even in the gigabytes which excite us commoners today, but in the multiple terabytes.
Scientists at the Center are in their early years of figuring out how to accomplish the physical task of storing and making such huge amounts of information available. Brain images are quickly becoming important to many areas of psychological investigation. Unfortunately, not every psychologist has a brain imaging machine at her or his disposal. And those who do have access often pay a pretty penny for the staff and machine time necessary to make their images. There are few dedicated research fMRI machines in the country. Instead, most of these machines are to be found in medical facilities and are used mainly for medical purposes. Scientists who wish to use the machines often find themselves doing so on the "off hours" and paying a premium for the privilege.
The need for images and the information underlying them outstrips the current capacity to produce them, not to mention the current expertise in imaging within the psychological research community. Enter the fMRI Data Center. Just as data from longitudinal studies may be used to answer questions the original investigators did not think to ask, so it is with brain images and the additional data underlying those images. It is important, therefore, that the Center's holdings include all the data that underlie the published fMRI studies that make up its corpus. That includes the pre-processed images and all the technical information that gives meaning to the images. Recognizing that many who need to use these data are not yet well versed in how to use them, the Center provides training in addition to providing data. Pretty smart. But that's what you'd expect from people whose business is the functioning of the human brain.
For now, you can use your Internet connection to look at the holdings of the Center. When you have settled on the data you wish to have, you submit your request and the Center ships you the data you have requested. No doubt the day will come when such large volumes of data can be sent easily over the Internet.
