1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems
Creators: name:   INCF Secretariat
name: Jyl Boline
name: Hawrylycz, Michael
name: Williams, Robert
Publisher: name: F1000 Research Limited
Year: 2018

description: The recommendations of this workshop group center around the mission of INCF “to contribute to the development of scalable, portable, and extensible digital applications that can be used by neuroscience laboratories to further knowledge of the human brain and related diseases.” Our expectation is that in the near future, research will involve intense interactions among scientists and computer networks at the level of ideas and dynamic reusable data. Neuroscientists will place greater reliance on stable web-enabled knowledgebases and will move away from rigid legacy models involving static research summaries and one-way non-digital communication. Atlases and spatial indexes will play a fundamental role in this shifting research landscape and will evolve into critical resources for gathering, securing, analyzing, and communicating research.<br><br>In the next decade, the standard bearer of scientific progress— the primary research paper—is likely to transition from a sleek and static synopsis of results and conclusions to a more complete, dynamic, and re-computable encapsulation of data and interpretation. This transition is already evident in the fields of genomics and bioinformatics in which papers are often pointers to massive data sets, analytic tools, and other appendix material. It is likely that a typical 3rd-millenium neuroscience communication/publication will include accessible data sets with full metadata, far more complete details on experimental design, and an enriched discussion section including interactive content such as a forum for genuine discussion between the lead authors and a larger community of reviewers and commentators.<br><br>Web-accessible brain atlases and spatial indexes will undoubtedly be among the most important tools needed to transition gracefully from our static synopsis mode of publication to a data-rich, dynamic, multidimensional mode of scientific interaction. Atlases will be key query tools as they appeal to our preference for visual exploration of complex data sets. Thus, this is a crucial time for an international community of neuroscientists to begin to converge on a lingua franca for digital neuroscience atlases, less with the goal of enforcing conformity, than with the goal of building resources and tools that translate among existing and future atlasing systems and their terminologies. This kind of transnational and translational activity ideally matches the mission of the INCF in the domain of digital atlasing.<br><br>With these longer-term objectives in mind, the 1st INCF Mouse and Rat Atlasing Workshop was held in Stockholm in February 2007. Our first objective was to survey current activities and plans related to mouse and rat brain digital atlasing systems and to produce a broad international inventory of resources and ongoing efforts. The second objective was to review the range of techniques that are being used to build, normalize, segment, and label atlases and to examine what aspects of this technical work are redundant, compatible, and compliant across platforms. The third objective was to forge an international network to foster increased collaboration and interoperability across national, linguistic, and funding barriers and to examine how to promote international collaborations in the future.<br><br>The final and most important objective of this workshop was to improve the impact of atlasing projects in the near term (5 years) while reducing costs and redundancy of these efforts. Funds spent in support of the INCF secretariat and the national nodes should ultimately be leveraged many times over. Atlasing efforts in each member country should be able to accomplish more as part of a coordinated INCF activity than they would in isolation. To attain this goal, the INCF secretariat and the supporting nodes strongly encourage integration, code reuse, and joint projects.<br><br>Researcher goals and platforms differ, and all participants at this workshop accept, and even encourage, a wide variety of approaches to brain atlasing. However, all participants also appreciate the enormous benefits that may be gained by combining and integrating across diverse resources.