Rationale and design of the European Computerized Human Brain Database System

The European Computerized Human Brain Database (ECHBD) is an innovative approach to neuroscience, where state-of-the-art database technology has been utilised for building a system for meta-research. Meta-research here refers to research on 3D brain images, obtained from various neuroimaging techniques. The system is built on top of the RASDAMAN rasterdata manager and the object-oriented DBMS O/sub 2/. A client/server interface allows access to the database over the Internet. The system will be open for use by the ECHBD project partners in July 1999. The ECHBD system focuses on ease of use, featuring visual navigation and query specification. We discuss basic data management problems in experimental neuroscience and describe how the ECHBD system is designed to address these problems.