On 6 September, the VirtualBrainCloud project held its second General Assembly meeting in Barcelona, Spain, followed by a Technical Meeting on ‘Integration and Interfaces’. Jean Georges (Executive Director) and Angela Bradshaw (Project Officer) attended the meeting. The VirtualBrainCloud (TVB_Cloud) project is aiming to create a decision support system for clinical practice, giving clinicians access to high-quality, multidisciplinary data on neurodegenerative disease via a cloud-based, personalised brain simulation platform. To achieve this aim, TVB_Cloud will collect, collate and integrate multiple sources of clinical data, including EEG scans, MRI and PET images, genetic screening information and biomarker data. TVB_Cloud will also create an adapted cloud-based infrastructure for the integrated data sources, hosted on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.
The TVB_Cloud General Assembly meeting focused primarily on the computational aspects of the project, although legal and ethical issues (e.g data protection and patient confidentiality) were also briefly discussed. Project partners presented the work they have been doing to render data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reuseable (FAIR), also highlighting data management and warehousing strategies that are being explored. Martin Hofmann-Apitius from the Fraunhofer Institute presented work from WP4, in which longitudinal models of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are being generated based on existing clinical datasets. WP4 is also creating longitudinal “biotypes” for disease progression, hoping to improve patient stratification by integrating several biological and behavioural parameters. The General Assembly meeting concluded with data presentations from partners involved in WP8, showing the different computer pipelines that will be integrated into the personalised simulation platform of TVB_Cloud. The Technical Meeting mainly focused on Cloud architecture: teams from Fraunhofer and Forschungszentrum Jülich discussed data ontologies, integration of the Cloud with HPC clusters and repository integration. The meeting drew to a close with lively discussions on the best computational approaches to use, aided by the arrival of two coffee machines and Spanish pastries.