Presentation
I believe answers to several burning questions about the brain can be found in research data that already exist in the cloud. There is so much potential in organizing these data and making it possible to find them and reuse them. I also believe that the increasingly sophisticated 3D brain atlases available are the suitable place to organize and present multimodal brain data. We asked ourselves how to organize and present large amounts of heterogeneous brain (meta)data to make them reusable by independent researchers, and how to represent heterogeneous brain data of different modalities in a normalized fashion in 3D brain atlases.
I will share the workflows we created and show how they were implemented in the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure for brain data. We have a search engine presenting 1000 datasets, we have brain atlas viewers, and we have information coupling open brain datasets to the brain atlases. We have what we need to make a platform like Google Maps, but for the brain, with opportunities to spatially query open brain data from a graphical interface based on 3D brain atlases. A platform where we could co-visualize and integrate spatially relevant brain data and reveal new connections to help us answer questions about dementia or other brain diseases before we have to experience it ourselves.
Speaker
Camilla Hagen Blixhavn is a PhD student in neuroinformatics and neuroanatomy at the University of Oslo. Together with an international team she has contributed to build the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure for neuroscience, specifically its data sharing service and the presentation of shared datasets in its search engine, the EBRAINS Knowledge Graph Search, https://search.kg.ebrains.eu/. She has contributed with several brain datasets within this platform and has published papers describing workflows and specific collections of brain data.
After she delivered her PhD thesis earlier this year, she was employed by the University Library of Oslo to facilitate researchers and students in aligning with open science and data sharing, but also to aid in strategizing how the library should deal with the development of AI in research and education. She will defend her thesis, describing how we have everything we need to make an intuitive platform for finding brain data using 3D brain atlases, on January 23rd next year.
Program
11:30 – Doors open and lunch is served
12:00 – "Organizing the brain – visual representations of open brain data in 3D brain atlases" by Camilla Hagen Blixhavn (PhD Candidate, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences)
This event is open for all students, PhD candidates, postdocs, and everyone else who is interested in the topic. No registration needed.
About the seminar series
Once a month, dScience will invite you to join us for lunch and professional talks at the Science Library. In addition to these, we will serve lunch in our lounge in Kristine Bonnevies house every Thursday. Due to limited space (40 people), this will be first come, first served. See how to find us here.
Our lounge can also be booked by PhDs and Postdocs on a regular basis, whether it is for a meeting or just to hang out – we have fresh coffee all day long!