Brain atlasing tool interoperation: NeuroTerrain-Smart Atlas synergistic visualization and analysis environment

Many research efforts using anatomical image analysis have as their goal to identify biologically relevant objects present within the image data, to provide a means to quantitatively analyze these objects, to compare the distribution of those objects to other features, and finally to properly annotate the objects so as to be able share this analysis in an integrated informatics framework. The neuroinformatics tools designed to achieve these ends have been developed in a fragmented manner with each resource developing access to unique data sets and analytical capabilities, Their integration would enrich the neuroinformatic network enabling queries and analysis across a number of resources. A central objective of the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) is to achieve this integration and we present here a demonstration of how two such tools - the NeuroTerrain Atlas/NetOStat client and the Smart Atlas - can expose their functionality via a re-usable interface, so as to promote interoperation of tools and data.