Connecting Brain Imaging Terms to Established Lexicons: a Precursor for Data Sharing and Querying

For data sharing to be useful, data must not only be stored in an organized fashion, but metadata that captures information about how the data was acquired, processed, and analyzed, must also be available. Additionally, metadata must describe data using unambiguously defined terms. Efforts are underway to provide lexicons of brain imaging terms to the neuroscience community. Two examples are NeuroLex[1] and RadLex[2]; lexicons for the domains of neuroscience and radiology, respectively. While NeuroLex follows the OBO[3] principle of always defining a term, RadLex identifies relationships among terms, but often without definitions.

On the other side are data and tool repositories which may have a defined schema or a fixed set of terms, but do not provide definitions. Therefore, users may not know precisely what is meant by each term. The lack of standardized terms makes it difficult for query tools to search across collections at different institutions and makes data provenance information ambiguous.

The goal of this project is to provide definitions for terms used in each stage of the data lifecycle of brain MRI-based experiments and place the terms within NeuroLex and RadLex. We have begun our efforts with terms used in the acquisition phase. The source of the terms are 1) the XCEDE schema[4], 2) common and private DICOM fields[5], 3) NITRC database query terms[6], and 4) BIRN’s Human Imaging Database (HID) terms[7]. In some cases, connecting terms were added to the lexicons to connect the new set of terms with those already in the lexicons.

This work expands existing lexicons with terms commonly used in MRI-based neuroimaging and will enhance the ability to query across data and tool collections.

This work was conducted within the Derived Data Task Force of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility Program on Standards for Datasharing. KGH, DK, and JT are also supported by BIRN (1U24-RR025736, U24-RR021992) and KGH is supported by by the Collaborative Tools Support Network Award (1U24-RR026057-01).

References: 1)http://neurolex.org, 2)http://www.radlex.org, 3)http://www.obofoundry.org http://www.xcede.org, 4)http://medical.nema.org/, 5)http://www.nitrc.org, 6)http://www.birncommunity.org/[…]/