Focused Review Article
Digital atlases as a framework for data sharing
Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, USA
Digital brain atlases are useful as references, analytical tools, and as a data integration framework. As a result, they and their supporting tools are being recognized as potentially useful resources in the movement towards data sharing. Several projects are connecting infrastructure to these tools which facilitate sharing, managing, and retrieving data of different types, scale, and even location. With these in place, we have the ability to combine, analyze, and interpret these data in a manner not previously possible, opening the door to examine issues in new and exciting ways, potentially lead to speedier discovery of answers as well as new questions about the brain. Here we discuss recent efforts in the use of digital mouse atlases for data sharing.
Keywords: atlas, neuroinformatics, anatomical framework, data management, gene expression, mouse brain, brain
Copyright: © 2008 Boline, Lee and Toga. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence: Arthur W. Toga, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, UCLA, 635 Charles E. Young Drive South, Los Angeles, California, 90095-7334, USA. e-mail: toga@loni.ucla.edu
Citation: Boline J, Lee E and Toga AW (2008) Digital atlases as a framework for data sharing. Front. Neurosci. 2,1:100-106. doi:10.3389/neuro.01.012.2008
Received: 07 April 2008; paper pending published: 22 May 2008; accepted: 22 May 2008; published online: 15 July 2008.
Edited by:
Jan G. Bjaalie, International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility , Sweden; University of Oslo, Norway
Reviewed by:
*Correspondence: Arthur W. Toga, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, UCLA, 635 Charles E. Young Drive South, Los Angeles, California, 90095-7334, USA. e-mail: toga@loni.ucla.edu
