MBAT: A scalable informatics system for unifying digital atlasing workflows

Background: Digital atlases provide a common semantic and spatial coordinate system that can be leveraged to compare, contrast, and correlate data from disparate sources. As the quality and amount of biological data continues to advance and grow, searching, referencing, and comparing this data with a researcher's own data is essential. However, the integration process is cumbersome and time-consuming due to misaligned data, implicitly defined associations, and incompatible data sources. This work addressing these challenges by providing a unified and adaptable environment to accelerate the workflow to gather, align, and analyze the data. Results: The MouseBIRN Atlasing Toolkit (MBAT) project was developed as a cross-platform, free open-source application that unifies and accelerates the digital atlas workflow. A tiered, plug-in architecture was designed for the neuroinformatics and genomics goals of the project to provide a modular and extensible design. MBAT provides the ability...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Daren Lee, Seth Ruffins, Queenie Ng, Nikhil Sane, Steve Anderson, Arthur W. Toga
• Keywords: BMCBI 2010, Business, Data Sources, Image Data, Incompatible Data Sources