A neuroinformatics database system for disease-oriented neuroimaging research

Clinical databases are continually growing and accruing more patient information. One of the challenges for managing this wealth of data is efficient retrieval and analysis of a broad range of image and non-image patient data from diverse data sources. This article describes the design and implementation of a new class of research data warehouse, neuroinformatics database system (NIDS), which will alleviate these problems for clinicians and researchers studying and treating patients with intractable temporal lobe epilepsy. The NIDS is a secured, multi-tier system that enables the user to gather, proofread, analyze, and store data from multiple underlying sources. In addition to data management, the NIDS provides several key functions including image analysis and processing, free text search of patient reports, construction of general queries, and on-line statistical analysis. The establishment of this integrated research database will serve as a foundation for future hypothesis-driven experiments, which could uncover previously unsuspected correlations and perhaps help to identify new and accurate predictors for image diagnosis.