Biomedical Informatics Research Network: integrating multi-site neuroimaging data acquisition, data sharing and brain morphometric processing

The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is a National Institutes of Health (USA) initiative that fosters distributed collaborations in biomedical science by utilizing information technology innovations. Morphometry BIRN is one of its testbeds and has the goal to develop the ability to conduct clinical imaging studies across multiple sites, to analyze structural imaging data with the most powerful software regardless of development site, and to test new hypotheses on large collections of subjects with well-characterized image and clinical data. Through large-scale analyses of patient population data acquired and pooled across sites, we are investigating neuroanatomic correlates of Alzheimer's Disease Depression and Mild Cognitive Impairment subjects. This paper describes progress in multi-site image calibration and in software integration for multi-site image processing.