Human Brain Project

The Human Brain Project on three research areas: future neurosciences, future medicine and future computing.

In first phase, the Human Brain Project built an integrated system of ICT-based research platforms.

The ICT-based research platforms are dedicated respectively to Neuroinformatics, Brain Simulation, High Performance Computing, Medical Informatics, Neuromorphic Computing and Neurorobotics.

The CHUV Department of Clinical Neuroscience is responsible for the setting up of the Medical Informatics Platform, under the leadership Dr. Ferath Kherif. The platform is federating hospital and other clinical data on all brain diseases and across multiple levels of biology.

The Medical Informatics Platform

The Medical Informatics Platform (MIP) is a subproject (SP8) of the Human Brain Project, a large ten-year scientific research project that aims to build a collaborative ICT-based scientific research infrastructure to allow researchers across the globe to advance knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, computing, and brain-related medicine.

The Medical Informatics Platform, led by Dr. Ferath Kherif, acts as a bridge between brain-science research, clinical research and patient care, providing the collaborative infrastructure and tools to improve our knowledge of the human brain. The Platform is based in Lausanne, Switzerland at the CHUV (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne University hospital) and is financed by the European Commission.

The HBP’s Medical Informatics Platform will enable researchers and clinicians to access and analyze anonymized multi-modal patient data federated across multiple hospitals and research centers.

The iterative refinement and reuse of models and analyses will lead to identification of Biological Signatures of Diseases and novel classifications of brain disorders, thus more accurate diagnoses and personalized medicine.

The primary goal of MIP is to allow clinicians and neuroscientist a way to unify otherwise inaccessible data and thereby create one federated venue for storing information related to brain disease and neurological disorders. MIP facilitates:

1. Easier record sharing, including data and images that are currently warehoused in hospitals and research archives.

2. The way in which hospitals and various medical establishments store, process and distribute important documents and image files.

3. The creation of tools to extract biological signatures from multi-level data

4. A faster, more efficient way to analyze federated information.

In the longer term, the data will allow for disease simulation by modifying models of healthy brains. Disease simulation will provide researchers with a powerful tool to prove the causal mechanisms responsible for disease, and to screen putative treatments. This will accelerate medical research and reduce suffering and costs associated with brain diseases.

Medicine is experiencing a data explosion, driven by advances in genetics and imaging technology. We lack effective strategies to integrate the data and to identify the unique "biological signatures" of neurological and psychiatric diseases. However, new databasing and data mining technologies now makes it possible to federate and analyse the huge volumes of data accumulating in hospital archives, allowing researchers to identify the biological changes associated with disease and opening possibilities for early diagnosis and personalised medicine.

The Medical Informatics Platform becomes a service to:

• clinicians – for objective diagnoses and treatment of brain disease
• neuroscientist - to apply, test and input new models and methods
• pharmaceutical and biotech companies - for disease target discovery