A Peek Inside The BrainA Peek Inside The Brain

New data-gathering and data-analysis techniques are beginning to help some doctors diagnose patients who have disorders or diseases that are especially difficult to pin down. Such technology may provide significant assistance in treating problems involving the most complex part of the human body--the brain.

Brain Resource was formed nearly five years ago by brain researchers at West Mead Hospital in Sydney, Australia. With IBM as the key technology provider, the company is creating what's described as the world's largest standardized database related to the brain.

The effort was formed with personalized medicine in mind. "Individual brains are so variable and respond differently to different treatments, it's very difficult to predict which person with, say, depression is more likely to respond to different medications and why," says Dr. Evian Gordon, founding director of the Brain Dynamics Center at the hospital and CEO and founder of Brain Resource.

Data--including information and test results on brain function, brain speed, memory, and brain structural MRI testing--is being collected from about 3,000 people per year and placed into the Brain Resource International Database, a DB2 database running on an IBM xSeries 240 server and distributed storage system. It's around 3 terabytes, and the company anticipates it will grow by as much as 2 terabytes per year.

In the past, much of this kind of information about the brain had been examined in isolation. The goal of this database is to harness it in a standardized format so it can be analyzed in a statistical and objective approach.

So far, about 100 scientists worldwide are linked to the database and add data that can help researchers analyze the "millions of correlations" that can help shed light on, for instance, what factors could be used to indicate how specific drugs might affect the speed of brain function, memory, structure as seen via an MRI, and other factors in patients afflicted with disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Gordon says.

Approximately 10 pharmaceutical companies have under way about 16 projects that tap into the database, including a search for other biomarkers that indicate how a drug for depression affects the brain, he says.

There are many factors that play roles in brain dysfunctions, and that's why doctors often have difficulty deciding whether specific drugs or therapies would be the most successful treatment, for instance, for a child afflicted with attention deficit disorder or an adult suffering from depression, Gordon says.

By tapping into this data and identifying and analyzing correlations, researchers and eventually doctors could come up with drug-treatment plans or other therapies that are more customized for patients' individual situations. For instance, Gordon says, a person who has heart problems and also suffers from depression and sleep disturbances might be found to benefit more greatly from a specific treatment protocol than a patient who has depression and sleep disturbances but no heart problems.

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