The Blackfynn Platform for Rapid Data Integration and Collaboration - Summary
One in seven people worldwide suffers from a brain disorder, e.g., epilepsy, Parkinson's, stroke,
or dementia. Development of future treatments depends on improving our understanding of
brain function and disease, and validating new treatments critically depends on identifying the
underlying biomarkers associated with different conditions. Biomarker discovery requires
volume, quality, richness, and diversity of data. This Direct-to-Phase II project extends
Blackfynn's cloud data management platform for team science, in order to support interactive
data curation and integration and to facilitate biomarker discovery. Our first technical aim
develops tools to help select, curate, assess, and regularize datasets: we develop novel “live”
query capabilities to ensure users discover relevant data, develop mechanisms for using data's
provenance to decide on trustworthiness, and build tools for mapping fields to common data
elements. These capabilities address the critical, under-served problem of selecting the data to
analyze. Our second technical aim develops techniques for incorporating algorithms to link and
co-register across multi-modal data and metadata. Using ranking and machine learning, we can
incorporate and combine state-of-the-art algorithms for finding data relationships, and we can
link to remote data sources. These capabilities enable scientists to analyze richer datasets with
multiple data modalities and properties – thus enabling them to discover more complex
correlations and biomarkers. In our third aim, Blackfynn's new technical capabilities will be
applied to challenges faced by Blackfynn partners, including problems assessing
trustworthiness of data annotations, conducting image analysis, modeling epileptic networks,
and identifying biomarkers for neuro-oncology indications. As part of this validation we will
also develop HIPAA-compliant mechanisms for working with protected and de-identified data
together. Together, these three thrusts will ensure that development of the Blackfynn platform
results in tools and technologies that meaningfully accelerate scientific understanding and
discovery over rich and complex data, leading to improved treatments for neurologic disease.
