Imagine a brain as a puzzle, with each research data piece like a puzzle piece that can help complete the picture of disease understanding, prevention, treatment, and monitoring. The Brain-CODE platform, developed by the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI), is like a giant puzzle solving machine, enabling researchers to combine and reuse health research data to gain increasingly rich insights into patients and populations. By meeting the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, Brain-CODE is revolutionizing neuroscience research. Researchers can easily find and access specific data cuts of interest that align with their research questions using Brain-CODE’s interactive interface. With multiple data access mechanisms and standardized data elements, Brain-CODE promotes interoperability and integration with other research datasets. It also implements quality assurance measures to ensure maximum data value for reuse. The successes and challenges of this FAIR-focused neuroinformatics platform are being highlighted by OBI, which aims to facilitate widespread collection and sharing of neuroscience research data for learning health systems. Explore the full article to learn more about the transformative power of Brain-CODE!

The effective sharing of health research data within the healthcare ecosystem can have tremendous impact on the advancement of disease understanding, prevention, treatment, and monitoring. By combining and reusing health research data, increasingly rich insights can be made about patients and populations that feed back into the health system resulting in more effective best practices and better patient outcomes. To achieve the promise of a learning health system, data needs to meet the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. Since the inception of the Brain-CODE platform and services in 2012, the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) has pioneered data sharing activities aligned with FAIR principles in neuroscience. Here, we describe how Brain-CODE has operationalized data sharing according to the FAIR principles. Findable—Brain-CODE offers an interactive and itemized approach for requesters to generate data cuts of interest that align with their research questions. Accessible—Brain-CODE offers multiple data access mechanisms. These mechanisms—that distinguish between metadata access, data access within a secure computing environment on Brain-CODE and data access via export will be discussed. Interoperable—Standardization happens at the data capture level and the data release stage to allow integration with similar data elements. Reusable – Brain-CODE implements several quality assurances measures and controls to maximize data value for reusability. We will highlight the successes and challenges of a FAIR-focused neuroinformatics platform that facilitates the widespread collection and sharing of neuroscience research data for learning health systems.

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