The Age of Collaboration

The future of neuroimaging, neuroscience, and the end of neurological diseases and disorders lies in collaboration. To this end, I encourage researchers to make their software open source and publicly available. I have already begun putting the tools that I develop on the NITRC website. I would encourage people to look at these tools and build upon them. They are a start, but by no means an end of their development. The ability to tap in the collective software of the community will be a great benefit for both training and research. It will also reduce the need to reinvent the wheel. From a data perspective, small samples are not going to be sufficient to understand the development and aging of the human brain. More effort needs to be put into data sharing and open data distribution. While there are sites with data, much of them are hard to search or lack the information needed to analyze the data. Researchers should be forward thinking in their data releases to maximize the utilization of their datasets. There are at least three datasets that I plan to utilize in the near future: NKI-Rockland Sample, Human Connectome Project, and ADNI. These are just three examples of useable datasets available to researchers. I would encourage others to post what datasets they have used or plan to use in the future. Knowledge of existing datasets will increase their utilization. Hope to see more collaboration in the future and the end of neurological diseases and disorders. Stayed tuned for more information on Brainhack 2013.

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