Science and technology
02 Nov 2021EBRAINS HealthDataCloud – Tackling the sensitive data challenge in brain research
Researchers in the Human Brain Project work on a new solution for sensitive medical data.
The EBRAINS research infrastructure will add a new service for sensitive medical brain data to its offers for the scientific community – the EBRAINS HealthDataCloud. A multinational team of academic and industrial partners in the Human Brain Project is developing the privacy compliant service for medical brain data over the next two years. The project is coordinated by Europe’s largest University Hospital Charité Berlin, and funded with 1 million Euro.
Researchers need better solutions to share, store and process health data in the EU – a problem that became strikingly clear in the Covid-crisis. But new ways of managing such data are also extremely vital in the fight against brain diseases, which pose an ever-growing burden on healthcare systems in the aging European societies.
EBRAINS, the digital research infrastructure created by the Human Brain Project, offers a range of resources to support neuroscientists. With the HealthDataCloud the toolbox will now grow to provide a special service supporting scientists in doing research on human data containing personal information - including the data of patients.
Data science for brain health
The benefits enabling large-scale analysis of hospital data can be vast: For prevalent diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, complex simulations of personalized computational brain models and AI-driven approaches could help to better understand the complexity behind these conditions. And for many of the rarer diseases of the brain, where often only few cases exist per hospital, increased data sharing could bring the first statistically valid analyses ever.
Solving the Privacy Challenge
Large data-science approaches to the brain, and to health in general, need to solve an important problem: All research needs to strictly protect privacy - and thus the freedom and rights of each individual, and comply with European GDPR rules (General Data Protection Regulation).
To this end, EBRAINS HealthDataCloud will provide a GDPR-compliant, federated research data ecosystem that enables neuroscience research consortia across Europe and beyond to work with sensitive neuroscience data originating from human subjects, as well as defined routes for sharing of the data and results.
The foundation for the EBRAINS HealthDataCloud is the GDPR-compliant Virtual Research Environment (VRE) located at the Charité University Medicine Berlin, which is compatible with the EBRAINS digital infrastructure and provides a secure and scalable data platform for multi-institutional research teams. The platform is an outcome of the EU project Virtual Brain Cloud that contributes to the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
The consortium is coordinated by Prof. Petra Ritter from the Berlin Institute of Health and Department of Neurology at Charité University Medicine Berlin and includes partners from research and industry in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Norway and Greece.
“Enabling the integration of distributed health data sources and empowering scientists to model and simulate complex phenomena on interdisciplinary digital twins - while protecting the privacy of the data subjects and patients - will spawn a multiplicity of innovations that may spark breakthroughs towards solving grand challenges of our times such as dementia. After I had the opportunity to lead the implementation of Virtual Brain Simulation Services in EBRAINS during the past funding period, I am now very pleased to contribute to the further expansion of services together with an excellent team.”
Coordinator of EBRAINS HealthDataCloud
“The HBP and EBRAINS are looking forward to working with the HealthDataCloud consortium to further enhance the research infrastructure into the domain of brain health data.”
HBP Director of Innovation and CIIO of EBRAINS AISBL
“The Human Brain Project has set up a powerful neurodata ecosystem - EBRAINS. With the addition of HealthDataCloud, we grow further, providing powerful tools to clinical researchers. It is one of our contributions to the EU’s Health Data Space, which aims at the digital transformation of healthcare in Europe.”
HBP Director General and CEO of EBRAINS AISBL
Full list of partners
HealthDataCloud - EBRAINS Service for Health Data in the Cloud
Proposal Coordinator: Charite Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Department of Neurology), Germany
Proposal Partners:
• Indoc Research Europe gGmbH, Germany
• Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), Germany
• Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
• KTH Royal Institute of Technology (PDC Center for High Performance Computing), Sweden
• Oslo University Hospital, Norway
• ATHENA Research and Innovation Centre (ATHENA R.C. Information Management Systems Institute, Management of Data Information and Knowledge), Greece
• Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich) / Swiss National Supercomputing Centre - CSCS, Switzerland
The HBP looks forward to expanding our synergies, fruitful exchanges, and innovative advancements with the full consortium.
Contact
Petra Ritter
petra.ritter@charite.de
Berlin Institute of Health, Charité University Medicine Berlin (CHARITE) Germany
- Actual funding of this proposal is contingent on the successful signature of the relevant agreements with the European Commission as well as its integration into the HBP Consortium Agreement
Media Contact:
Peter Zekert
Tel.: +49 2461 61 96860
press@humanbrainproject.eu
ABOUT THE HUMAN BRAIN PROJECT
The Human Brain Project (HBP) is the largest brain science project in Europe and stands among the biggest research projects ever funded by the European Union. It is one of the three FET Flagship Projects of the EU. At the interface of neuroscience and information technology, the HBP investigates the brain and its diseases with the help of highly advanced methods from computing, neuroinformatics and artificial intelligence, and drives innovation in fields like brain-inspired computing and neurorobotics.
ABOUT EBRAINS
EBRAINS is a new digital research infrastructure, created by the EU-funded Human Brain Project, to foster brain-related research and to help translate the latest scientific discoveries into innovation in medicine and industry, for the benefit of patients and society.
It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience and offers an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling and simulation tools, easy access to high-performance computing resources and to robotics and neuromorphic platforms.
All academic researchers have open access to EBRAINS’ state-of-the art services. Industry researchers are also very welcome to use the platform under specific agreements. For more information about EBRAINS, please contact us at info@ebrains.eu or visit www.ebrains.eu.
