The Child's Brain: Applications of the Internet Brain Volume Database (IBVD)

The Internet Brain Volume Database (IBVD, http://www.cma.mgh.harvard.edu/ibvd) is a web-based database designed to capture volumetric observations of neuroanatomic structures from the literature.  IBVD was the first web site dedicated to exposing, sharing, and integrating brain volume observations, and does so across species and disease.  The current objective is to capture retrospective data in order to finalize a proof of concept for the site to enable migration of the concept to a long term, sustainable solution.  Every week, numerous publications appear that include neuroanatomic volumetric observations; about one third of these are applications in the child and adolescent age groups, and the total magnitude of literature for particular neuroanatomic structures is quite variable.  The harvesting of published information is, at the moment, very labor intensive; thus initial efforts are concentrated on structures and disorders that have the maximum number of published observations.

IBVD is a web application implemented in PHP on top of a PostgreSQL database.  Data entry statistics (as of April, 2011) include 631 publications, 1158 subject groups, 9473 group volume entries, almost 300 clinical diagnoses, 1939 individuals, 10215 individual structural volume entries, and over 200 brain structures.  The use of a structured vocabulary is used in order to maximize the interoperability of this site with other data resources.  To date, the anatomic hierarchy supported by IBVD subtends a specific spatial scale of the complete possible neuroanatomic ontology space.  Structures from the whole brain to major subdivisions (e.g. cerebrum) to components of these major regions (e.g. cerebral cortex, white matter) to subcomponents within these regions (e.g. precentral gyrus) are mapped into this ontology.  Many of these structures have links to other ontological systems, and are organized through the NeuroLex system.

IBVD is currently being used for quick analyses of pediatric studies.  Results of published studies may be quickly viewed in the context of existing literature as a whole (see figure), and a similar visualization is done offline for studies in progress.

Applications of the meta-analysis facilitated by the database are many-fold.  In the pediatric populations, it is highly informative to study the extent to which volumetric patterns observed in the adult are also seen in the younger age groups: What age does the finding of differing rates of growth between gray and white matter structures first appear?  At what age does do the findings of gender dimorphism appear?  Is the adult asymmetric lateralization of the hippocampus also seen in children?  How prevalent in the literature is the finding of limbic volumetric alterations in children with pediatric bipolar disorder?