Integration of Large-Scale Neuroinformatics – The INCF

Abstract

Understanding the human brain and its function in health and disease represents one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. In the post-genomic era, an overwhelming accumulation of new data, at all levels of exploration from DNA to human brain imaging, has been acquired. This accumulation of facts has not given rise to a corresponding increase in the understanding of integrated functions in this vast area of research involving a large number of fields extending from genetics to psychology. Neuroinformatics is uniquely placed at the intersection between neuroscience and information technology, and emerges as an area of critical importance to facilitate the future conceptual development in neuroscience by creating databases which transcend different organizational levels and allow for the development of different computational models from the sub-cellular to the global brain level.