An european project for setting up the great european and american studies (neuGRID)

neuGRID is EU-funded project within the frame of the Information&Communication and Technologies Work Frame.
Aim of the project is to develop a new user-friendly Grid-based research e-Infrastructure enabling the European neuroscience community to carry out research required for the pressing study of degenerative brain diseases (for example, the Alzheimer disease). In neuGRID, the collection/archiving of large amounts of imaging data is paired with computationally intensive data analyses. Neuroscientists will be able to identify neurodegenerative disease markers through the analysis of 3D magnetic resonance brain images via the provision of sets of distributed medical and Grid services. The infrastructure is designed to be expandable to services for other medical applications and is compliant with EU and international standards regarding data collection, data management, and Grid construction. neuGRID exploits experience developed during previous EC-funded project MammoGrid (providing knowledge related to the middleware and upperware that allow applications to talk to the Grid), and AddNeuroMed (collection/archiving/retrieval of multicentre clinical data, biomedical images and computerized image analysis). Key research challenges are: the gridification of the cortical thickness extraction algorithm pipeline, the development of a mid-layer of services between user-facing and grid-facing services to make the infrastructure expandable to a number of algorithm pipelines, and testing and validation of the prototype infrastructure. neuGRID aims to become the “Google for Brain Imaging”, providing a centrally-managed, easy-to-use set of tools with which scientists can perform analyses and collaborate.