Towards a transatlantic “ecosystem” for the neurosciences

This year's BigBrain Workshop “Challenges of Multimodal Data Integration”, organized by the Helmholtz International BigBrain Analytics and Learning Laboratory (HIBALL), brought together 120 participants from Europe, North America and Asia from 9 to 11 September - 90 of them on site at the Palazzo della Salute in Padua. The event was hosted by Maurizio Corbetta and his team from the Padova Neuroscience Center, a member of the European research platform EBRAINS since last year.

The focus of the workshop series is the BigBrain data set, the 3D model of the human brain in extremely high resolution developed by McGill University (Montreal) in Canada and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, and part of the Human Brain Atlas on EBRAINS.

This time, the scientific discourse centered on the multimodal integration of data and its interoperability as well as the establishment of a transatlantic multimodal “ecosystem” for the neurosciences, in which the platforms in Europe - the digital research infrastructure EBRAINS - and in North America (CBRAIN, CONP) can be linked in the future.

After kicking off with a training day co-organized by Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL), including a presentation by Michael Hawrylycz from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the workshop focused on presentations by Maurizio Corbetta (“Architecture and function of spontaneous brain activity in health and pathology”) and Michael Thiebaut de Schotten (“The emergent properties of the connected brain”). The contributions by Alan Evans (“The McGill multimodal data ecosystem”) and Katrin Amunts (“BigBrain as part of the Multimodal Atlas at EBRAINS”) were followed by a panel discussion on “The benefit of making multimodal data interoperable”, which was moderated by Amunts, Director of the Jülich Institute for Structural and Functional Organization of the Brain and Joint CEO of EBRAINS.

Videos from the event can be found here.

See also:

A new EBRAINS large-scale brain scanning endeavour is being coordinated in Padua
(27 June 2024)