STRUCTURAL INFORMATION FRAMEWORK FOR BRAIN MAPPING

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This proposal is a response to the Human Brain project Program Announcement, which seeks to facilitate the application of informatics methodology to neuroscience research because the rapid growth of neuroscience information makes it difficult for investigators to "...relate their findings to an integrated understanding of the nervous system...) The long term goal of this proposal is to develop an information system for organizing, visualizing and managing intra-operative cortical language mapping data, as a testbed for neuroscience information systems for functional brain mapping. Language has been, and continues to be explored through many different approaches, and the integration and correlation of mutimodality information is a prerequisite for the generation and testing of hypotheses that seek to explain the apparent variable patterns of cortical language maps. Based on our previous experience in developing a structural information framework for 3-D neuroanatomy, the language data will be organized both spatially, in terms of a patient-specific 3-D anatomic model obtained from high resolution MR imaging; and symbolically, in terms of a well-defined terminology based on the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System. The specific aims of this proposal are; 1) Develop an information system which integrates database, image processing, and 3-D graphics software in order to manage and visualize intra-operative cortical mapping data; 2) Develop methods for spatially organizing cortical language data by mapping them onto a 3-D model of the patient's own brain, reconstructed from high resolution MR images; 3) Develop methods for symbolically organizing cortical language data by classifying them according to a well-defined symbolic terminology and semantic relationships among terms; and 4) Utilize the information system to a) develop probability maps of likely language sites for use in pre-operative surgical planning, and b) test the hypothesis that the distribution of cortical language sites is correlated with variations in cortical surface anatomy. By solving the specific problem of data management for cortical language representation, our work will make a major contribution to the Human Brain Project through the development of a structural information framework that integrates multimodality data of cortical function with anatomically detailed 3-D models, providing the basis not only for testing structure- function correlations involving language data, but also for integrating other types of brain mapping data as well.