A Confocal Fluorescence Microscopy Brain Data Archive

PROJECT SUMMARY Brain image data collected by the neuroscience community will continue to grow dramatically in the next 5-10 years as the push to image physically larger volumes, such as whole brains from humans and other primates, becomes a focus. The scientific community, with the support of NIH data sharing policies, expect this valuable data to be shared and made available to the community as rapidly as possible. The Brain Image Library (BIL) is a public resource serving the neuroscience community by providing a persistent scalable repository for sharing microscopy data generated by brain researchers. Importantly, raw data can be archived with BIL, and all post-processing and analysis can be completed at BIL and rapidly made publicly available. BIL maximizes data reusability by providing rapid access to a range of community-specific software suites and user- specific software which can quickly access a variety of high-performance computational resources including GPU, CPU, high-RAM and machine learning nodes. This one-stop access encourages the reuse of data by making it easily accessible to a variety of scientists and promotes transparency and scientific discovery as the outcomes of any meta-analysis can be made public and tied directly to the original data content.