Jane Edwards
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Amazon Web Services have teamed up to improve the accessibility of a cloud-based ecosystem for neuroimaging datasets.
Johns Hopkins APL said Thursday the expanded partnership will enable AWS to further support the storage of neuroscience datasets within its Brain Observatory Storage Service & Database, dubbed BossDB, through the company’s Open Data Sponsorship Program.
“This relationship will catalyze the democratization of data access and accelerate scientific exploration by researchers and members of the public,” said Will Gray Roncal, a co-investigator in the neuroscience sroup at APL’s research and exploratory development department.
APL researchers developed BossDB to facilitate sharing of data as part of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks program backed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The National Institutes of Health supports the BossDB team through its BRAIN Initiative Informatics Program.
The BossDB ecosystem uses AWS resources such as Lambda, DynamoDB and S3 and comes with tools to support image processing and annotation, analysis and data visualization.
“With the support of computer scientists, engineers and neuroscientists at APL, BossDB currently hosts over 10 petavoxels of data consisting of dozens of public and private datasets, including large amounts of complex multidimensional data from over 30 collaborators,” said Brock Wester, principal investigator for the APL BossDB team.
“This enables anyone with internet access to visualize image data from different technologies to generate hypotheses or plan new experiments,” Wester added.
