In the News
Ellisman gives featured Society for Neuroscience lecture on emerging technologies, describing how neuroinformatics and advanced telecommunication infrastructures are accelerating discoveries about the brain.
November 5, 2007 — Innovative efforts underway at UCSD’s School of Medicine to leverage telecommunications and information technologies for accelerating biomedical research were featured during a special lecture during today’s annual Society for Neuroscience conference. UCSD’s track record of driving the development of digital age technologies for acquiring, visualizing, and communicating research information was highlighted in a special lecture delivered by Dr. Mark Ellisman, of the University of California, San Diego. being conducted all this week at San Diego’s Convention Center.
Dr. Mark Ellisman of the University of California, San Diego, presents a special lecture entitled "Integrating Neuroscience Knowledge: Brain Research in the Digital Age" at the 2007 Society for Neuroscience meeting, held in San Diego, California.
Ellisman’s focus was on how recent accomplishments in neuroinformatics is changing how researchers conceptualize and collaborate on human and animal model studies—in ways that were previously not possible. Citing detailed examples of on-going collaborations at the School of Medicine and California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, Ellisman illustrated what tomorrow’s neuroscientists can expect in an era in which scientific discoveries will hinge increasingly on the use of advanced telecommunications and information technologies for enabling researchers from across disciplines to acquire and share data. Ellisman was among four prominent neuroscientists, delivering this year’s presidential special lectures.
“Technological advances are accelerating the pace of discovery and allowing experiments that were not even dreamed of a decade ago,” says Dr. David Van Essen, president of the Society for Neuroscience, in his introductory comments to the lecturer. “They occur across many realms, ranging from the increasingly rapid sequencing of genes and proteins to the amazing ability to visualize brain structure and function in living animals.”
Neuroinformatics, the topic of Ellisman’s talk, is a relatively new field that provides tremendous opportunities for coping with the extraordinary flood of neuroscience-related data facing every neuroscientist. As emphasized by Ellisman, improved methods for data mining and data sharing will play a key role in accelerating progress in neuroscience research during the 21st century.
“A grand goal in neuroscience research is to understand how the interplay of structural, chemical, and electrical signals in nervous tissue gives rise to behavior,” says Mark Ellisman. “We are rapidly approaching this horizon as neuroscientists make use of an increasingly powerful arsenal for obtaining data—from the level of molecules to nervous systems—and engage in the arduous and challenging process of adapting and assembling neuroscience data at all scales of resolution and across disciplines into computerized databases.”
A consolidated strategy for integrating neuroscience data has been to provide a multi-scale structural or spatial scaffold on which existing and accruing elements of neuroscience knowledge can be located and relationships explored from any network-linked computer. However, Ellisman says, even data taken at similar scales from different sites, like structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, are difficult to merge in the absence of agreed upon standards that would allow such noninvasive brain imaging data to be brought together. Similarly, efforts to integrate multiscale data from different methods using a common spatial framework are hampered by incomplete descriptions of the microanatomy of nervous systems.
Progress toward overcoming these obstacles and integrating neuroscience knowledge are found in key projects including the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN; www.nbirn.net) and the Cell-Centered Database (CCDB; ccdb.ucsd.edu). The BIRN, which includes several UCSD participating laboratories, is a broad initiative sponsored by the National Institutes of Health that fosters large-scale collaborations in biomedical science by building on networks linking investigators to advanced information technology resources. Large-scale, cross-institutional imaging studies involving human subjects are underway on Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, and autism, using structural and functional MRI. Other BIRN projects focus on mouse animal models relevant to multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. They bring together data from multiple imaging methods, from whole brain MRI to molecular scale electron microscopy, providing a more complete anatomical continuum to help organize data coming from modern genomic and proteomic methods.
The CCDB takes up the important challenge of providing an informatics framework for assembling knowledge pertaining to structures on a minute scale—dimensions that encompass macromolecular complexes, organelles, synapses, and other integral components of the fantastically complex structure we call the brain.
“This effort, in concert with other community efforts to build accurate computerized representations of the brain and all its elements, will provide continuous structural scaffolds for organizing brain information,” Ellisman says. “Recent studies demonstrate that such multiscale models, assembled in computers from multiple data sources, can enable the testing of hypotheses about the fundamental properties of the nervous system that are pertinent to both normal and abnormal brain function.”
Ellisman delivered one of four Society for Neuroscience Presidential Lectures, titled “Integrating Neuroscience Knowledge: Brain Research in the Digital Age,” on Monday, November 5, 2007, at 5:15 p.m. in the San Diego Convention Center. Considered the premier conference for neuroscientists and related researchers, the 37th annual Society for Neuroscience conference runs from November 3-7 conference, and is anticipating in excess of 30,000 attendees.
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Contact/Quotes: Mark Ellisman, PhD, University of California, San Diego (858) 534-2251; mark@ncmir.ucsd.edu
Lecture title: Integrating Neuroscience Knowledge: Brain Research in the Digital Age
(One of four Presidential Special Lectures focusing on emerging technologies in neuroscience)
Time of presentation: Monday, November 5, 2007, 5:15–6:15 p.m. San Diego Convention Center: Ballroom 20
