Toward a Cloud-based ‘Reproducibility Engine’ for Human NeuroImaging Research

SPRING 2017 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEES 

PI: David Somers, Psychological & Brain Sciences, CAS
Co-PIs: David Osher, Psychological & Brain Sciences, CAS

The project proposes the establishment of a reproducibility engine for neuroimagers, employing the power of the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), which will empower researchers to easily and quickly analyze hundreds of subjects and either replicate, or fail to replicate their laboratory-based findings. The scientific scope of the reproducibility engine is to examine functional connectivity of networks in the human brain. The plan will enable users to upload brain activation results from their (small N) task-based scans and examine the functional connectivity of these regions using the HCP dataset. Furthermore, this project will serve as a springboard in the development of other cloud-based analytical tools for reproducibility and large-scale data mining with the HCP. The development of these tools should also serve the growing neuroimaging community and the BU Cognitive Neuroimaging Center that will open in the CILSE building this spring.

This work is funded by a Hariri Research Award made in January, 2017.