Combining Neuroinformatics Databases for Multi-Level Analysis of Brain Disorders

Abstract

With the development of many methods of studying the brain, the field of neuroscience has generated large amounts of information obtained from various techniques: imaging techniques, electrophysiological techniques, techniques for analyzing brain connectivity, techniques for getting molecular information of the brain, etc. A plenty of neuroinformatics databases have been made for storing and sharing this useful information and those databases can be publicly accessed by researchers as needed. However, since there are too many neuroinformatics databases, it is difficult to find the appropriate database depending on the needs of researcher. Moreover, many researchers in neuroscience fields are unfamiliar with using neuroinformatics databases for their studies because data is too diverse for neuroscientists to handle this and there is little precedent for using neuroinformatics databases for their research. Therefore, in this article, we review databases in the field of neuroscience according to both their methods for obtaining data and their objectives to help researchers to use databases properly. We also introduce major neuroinformatics databases for each type of information. In addition, to show examples of novel uses of neuroinformatics databases, we represent several studies that combine neuroinformatics databases of different information types and discover new findings. Finally, we conclude our paper with the discussion of potential applications of neuroinformatics databases.