BLACKFYNN INC. — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase II: NIDA

Description

Summary One in seven people worldwide suffers from a brain disordere gepilepsyParkinson sstrokeor dementiaDevelopment of future treatments depends on improving our understanding of brain function and diseaseand validating new treatments critically depends on identifying the underlying biomarkers associated with different conditionsBiomarker discovery requires volumequalityrichnessand diversity of dataThis Direct to Phase II project extends Blackfynn s cloud data management platform for team sciencein order to support interactive data curation and integration and to facilitate biomarker discoveryOur first technical aim develops tools to help selectcurateassessand regularize datasetswe develop novellivequery capabilities to ensure users discover relevant datadevelop mechanisms for using data s provenance to decide on trustworthinessand build tools for mapping fields to common data elementsThese capabilities address the criticalunder served problem of selecting the data to analyzeOur second technical aim develops techniques for incorporating algorithms to link and co register across multi modal data and metadataUsing ranking and machine learningwe can incorporate and combine state of the art algorithms for finding data relationshipsand we can link to remote data sourcesThese capabilities enable scientists to analyze richer datasets with multiple data modalities and propertiesthus enabling them to discover more complex correlations and biomarkersIn our third aimBlackfynn s new technical capabilities will be applied to challenges faced by Blackfynn partnersincluding problems assessing trustworthiness of data annotationsconducting image analysismodeling epileptic networksand identifying biomarkers for neuro oncology indicationsAs part of this validation we will also develop HIPAA compliant mechanisms for working with protected and de identified data togetherTogetherthese three thrusts will ensure that development of the Blackfynn platform results in tools and technologies that meaningfully accelerate scientific understanding and discovery over rich and complex dataleading to improved treatments for neurologic disease