HISTORY OF INC

Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Functional Activation

Our multidisciplinary neuroscience/neuroinformatics program was established by the Program Director in 1993 and initially funded as R01 DA08246 on 9/30/94. In his 1993 HBP grant application the PI promised that "During Year 02, development of multimodality analysis and visualization techniques will proceed at all collaborating centers, and pilot data will be accumulated in preparation for the submission of an NIH Program Project grant application". That HBP P20 application was submitted in 1995 and funded on 9/30/96 as P20 MH57180; it described three Projects: Project 1 (Temporal Resolution of fMRI: Seong-Gi Kim, PI; Kamil Ugurbil, Co-PI), Project 2 (Reproducible Features of Functional Neuroimages: Stephen Strother, PI), and Project 3 (Interactive Visualization for Neuroimaging: David Rottenberg, PI). In addition, to administrative and neuroinformatics support, it provided for a Neuroimaging Core (David Rottenberg, Core Leader; Bruce Rosen, Co-Core Leader) divided between Minneapolis and Boston. Subcontractees included Iwao Kanno (Physiology: Akita Research Institute, Akita, Japan), Lars Hansen (Electrical Engineering/Mathematical Modeling: Danish Technical University, Copenhagen, Denmark), DeWitt Sumners (Mathematics: FSU, Tallahassee, Florida), Nicholas Lange (Statistics: McClean Hospital, Belmont, MA) and Olaf Paulson (Neurology/Neurobiology: Rigshopital/National University of Denmark, Copenhagen, Denmark).

A supplement to MH57180, funded by NIMH in September, 1999, created a formal link between the International Neuroimaging Consortium and the International Consortium for Brain Mapping for the purpose of comparing the performance of six popular bias-correction algorithms. This linkage was further strengthened in 2001 when our competitive renewal application, which included subcontracts to UCLA for collaborative projects involving John Mazziotta and Roger Woods, was funded by the NIH. A competitive supplement funded in 2003 established formal collaborative work with Christos Davatzikos and Edward Herskovits at the University of Pennsylvania and Alan Evans and Louis Collins at McGill University.

In summary, the current Program represents a series of mature collaborations between senior investigators across three continents. These collaborations have been, and continue to be, characterized by the free exchange of ideas, data sets and algorithms; by the frequent exchange of personnel, including doctoral and postdoctoral students; and by the daily e-mail, weekly conference calls and Annual Workshops that cement working relationships within and between Projects and increase productivity. The large number of jointly-authored abstracts and full-length manuscripts published by the International Neuroimaging Consortium since 1996 indicates the extent to which the Projects and Cores have become scientifically integrated over the decade-plus grant period.