Web service makes big data available to neuroscientists

Randal Burns recalls that the brain-science community was "abuzz" in 2011. Burns, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, was focusing on astrophysics and fluid dynamics data management at the time. But he was intrigued when Joshua Vogelstein, a neuroscientist and colleague at Johns Hopkins, told him that the first large-scale neural-connectivity data sets had just been collected and asked for his help to present them online. "It was the first time that you had data of that quality, at that resolution and scale, where you had the sense that you could build a neural map of an interesting portion of the brain," says Burns. Vogelstein worked with Burns to build a system that would make those data -- 20 trillion voxels' worth -- available to the larger neuroscience community. The team has now generalized the software to support different classes of imaging data and describes the system this week (J.