The Biomedical Informatics Research Network

The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), an infrastructure initiative sponsored by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), fosters large dataand compute-intensive distributed collaborations in biomedical science with information technology innovations (Grethe et al. 2005; Ellisman and Peltier 2004).1 Currently, BIRN is composed of a collection of three scientific collaboratories centered around the brain imaging and genetics of human neurological disorders and the associated animal models. To enable these collaborative groups, the BIRN Coordinating Center (BIRN-CC) was established to develop, implement, and support the infrastructure necessary to achieve the large-scale data sharing, computation, and collaboration among the scientific collaboratories. BIRN’s overriding goal is to collect data from a number of researchers at different institutions so that for each scientific investigation, the scientists can consider sample sizes in the hundreds or thousands instead of in the tens. This is especially important in research into the causes and cures for relatively rare diseases. The BIRN collaboratories are: