brainlife.io: a decentralized and open-source cloud platform to support neuroscience research

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Data Science

Background:

• Advancements in neuroscience research necessitate robust standardization and tool development for rigor and transparency.
• Increasing data pipeline complexity poses challenges to achieving FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data access in neuroimaging.
• Democratizing access to complex neuroimaging data is crucial for broader scientific participation and discovery.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate brainlife.io, a platform designed to democratize neuroimaging research.
• To assess the validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability, and scientific utility of the brainlife.io platform.
• To demonstrate the platform's capability in handling data standardization, management, visualization, and processing.

Main Methods:

• The brainlife.io platform was developed to provide standardized data management, visualization, and processing capabilities.
• Automated provenance tracking was implemented to record the history of data objects throughout the research pipeline.
• The platform's performance was evaluated using four data modalities and data from 3,200 participants.

Main Results:

• brainlife.io successfully provides data standardization, management, visualization, and processing.
• The platform automatically tracks the provenance history of numerous data objects, enhancing transparency.
• Evaluation demonstrated the platform's validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability, and scientific utility across diverse datasets.

Conclusions:

• brainlife.io effectively democratizes neuroimaging research by simplifying data access and analysis.
• The platform's automated provenance tracking supports rigorous and transparent scientific investigation.
• brainlife.io offers a valuable tool for enhancing the FAIRness and scientific utility of neuroimaging data.