The objective of the National fMRI Data Center at Dartmouth College has been to establish a facility for the sharing of functional imaging data among the diverse community of cognitive neuroscience. The center's ultimate goal is to help speed the progress of understanding cognitive processes and the neural substrates that underlie them. There are two mechanisms by which the center is pursuing these goals: 1.Providing access to common data sets from peer reviewed journals that everyone can use in order to develop and evaluate methods, confirm hypotheses, and perform additional analyses. 2. Increasing the number of scientists that can examine, consider, analyze and assess the neuroimaging data that has already been collected and published. To date, the Data Center has created and is hosting a Web-site were invited authors from around the world have been asked to submit entire, raw data sets which correspond to the results reported in a special issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2000, Vol. 12, Suppl. 2). Currently, users can search the database using a Medline inspired query interface. This allows researchers to easily access and search the Data Center's resources without the need to learn a new interface. In the future, the Data Center's query interface will be expanded to include more complex data-mining capabilities. By the beginning of 2001, the raw image data from these reports will be available for users to order via CD or DAT tape. By providing neuroimaging data as well as the details of the experimental and scanner protocols, this will enable the users of the Data Center to create a much larger pool of data than found in any single study. Comparisons and analyses across datasets and experiments may be performed, new statistical techniques as well as improved techniques of increasing signal to noise ratio can be investigated. By making this data freely available to all researchers the Data Center will become a vital resource to the neuroimaging community. Equally important with providing public access to fMRI data is the center's educational role. To that end, the National fMRI Data Center at Dartmouth College will be hosting a user workshop in the Summer of 2001 to give researchers hands on training with the center's resources.
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