Aim of this proposal is to deploy e-Infrastructures (EC-funded MammoGrid and AddNeuroMed) to enable the European neuroscience community to carry out research required for the pressing study of degenerative brain diseases to build a new user-friendly grid-based research e-Infrastructure (neuGRID), where the collection/archiving of large amounts of imaging data is paired with computationally intensive data analyses.

This proposal will initially provide neuroscientists with the capability 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 and later to provide a general, expandable infrastructure of services for other medical applications.

neuGRID will be compliant with acknowledged EU and international standards regarding data collection, data management, and Grid construction. Of the two deployed infrastructures, MammoGrid will provide knowledge related to the middleware and upperware interface to the Grid, while AddNeuroMed that for the collection/archiving/retrieval of multicentre clinical data, biomedical images and computerized image analysis.

Key research challenges will be: the gridification of algorithm pipelines for brain image analysis, 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, 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.

Technical informations

Project acronym: neuGRID

Contract n°: RI-211714

Project type: I3

Start date: 01/02/2008

Duration: 36 months

Total budget: 3 058 911 €

Funding from the EC: 2 800 000 €

Total funded effort in person-month: 405

Web site: www.neuGRID.eu

Contact person: Giovanni B. Frisoni, email: gfrisoni@fatebenefratelli.it
                        tel.: +39 030 3501261, fax.: +39 030 3501313

Collaboration with other EC funded projects: ENIR, Innomed/AddNeuroMed, MammoGrid,
                       Health-E-Child