Enabling Parallel Computing of a Brain Connectivity Map Using the MediGRID-Infrastructure and FSL

摘要

The non-invasive method to track fibers of the human brain by analyzing diffusion weighted magnetic resonance images improves research of human brain structures and becomes therefore increasingly important. With fiber tracking, a connectivity map which depicts the degree of connectivity of the single voxels can be generated and used to improve knowledge about the human brain. Several tools exist to produce connectivity maps. One of them is part of the FMRIB Software Library (FSL) and free for non-commercial purposes. Due to long and therefore impracticable computing time on small computer cluster solutions, a GUI and the necessary software were implemented for the German MediGRID infrastructure. This was achieved by using wrapper scripts and a workflow for the Generic Workflow Execution Service (GWES). The solution is about 15 times faster than a small local cluster installation, depending on the number of employed MediGRID resources. This enables processing of connectivity maps for practical use in biomedical research. By using the D-Grid infrastructure, this solution is also suitable for small institutes without compute center capacities. For usability reasons, the GUI ConBrain was developed.