Mricloud: an MRI Data Platform with Cloud Storage and Cloud Computing Service

The importance of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology is elevating nowadays, especially in the research fields of neurological disorders, mental illness and cognitive neuroscience. According to the BRAIN Initiative project signed by Barack Obama (Apr 2, 2013), the new trend for brain researches is to discover the neural activity by formulating and analyzing the open-access large-scale brain imaging database across the collaborative institutes in various countries. However, to construct such a database, the emerging obstacles, including the data collection, management, sharing, and, most important of all, the time-consuming image processing, could slow down the progress toward understanding the brain functionalities. To solve these problems, the aim of this study is to construct an MRICloud with cloud storage and cloud computing service, which shall provide the following advantageous features: (1) A convenient platform for MRI data storage, management and sharing－Users could access, synchronize, and share their data on a server by Internet from mobile device, desktop, or a web browser. It provides a potential for Taiwanese researches to demonstrate a large-scale data center by integrating resources and sharing the collected MRI data. (2) A cloud computing service for MRI processing and analyses based on graphic processing unit (GPU) parallel computing technology－MRICloud provides an effective way to process and analyze the data of diffusion MRI and resting-state functional MRI based on the cloud computing technology by the computing power of GPU, which substantially reduces the gap between the acquired dataset and the hidden information of the brain science. (3) A web-based 3D visualization platform for MRI data and processed images－With the service of MRIColud, user could access the web browser easily by mobile device or laptop computer to visualize the three-dimensional brain surface, fiber tracts, functional connectivity map and other relative results derived from multiple MRI processing software. In this year, we have integrated this web-based visualization platform, cloud storage and cloud computing, and will release the MRICloud service for practical usage in the domestic neuroimaging society soon. We expect to provide a complete and useful architecture of MRICloud service to facilitate the neuroscience/radiology investigations and linking it with the world-wide BRAIN Initiative project in the near future.

Project ID:PB10308-4312
External Project ID:MOST103-2221-E182-002