A cloud-based image analysis gateway for traumatic brain injury research

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) may soon become the non-invasive tool of choice for diagnosing Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) due to its ability to examine white matter changes in the living brain. While research has shown the value of DTI in differentiating affected and control populations, further work is required to develop algorithms and tools that enable reliable and reproducible methods for obtaining clinical bio-markers. Current approaches are computationally intensive, collaborative and require orchestrated invocation of many independently developed research tools. Thus, researchers are faced with challenges related to developing such complex analysis pipelines and executing them at scale on high performance compute resources and over large subject cohorts. To alleviate the need for both considerable technical expertise and dedicated local resources to set up and run those analyses, we have developed an always available cloud-based gateway service in which computational resources are provisioned and configured on demand. We build upon the Globus Galaxies platform which allows researchers to assemble and execute complex pipelines through their web browser. Our DTI gateway supports a range of different analyses and implements an execution model in which cloud compute instances are dynamically provisioned and configured.