XTENS – an eXTensible Environment for NeuroScience

The XTENS (eXTensible Environment for NeuroScience) platform consists in an highly extensible environment for collaborative work that improve repeatability of experiment and provides data storage and analysis capabilities. The platform is divided in repository and application domains, branched in services with different purpose. The first domain is the central component of the platform and consists in a multimodal repository with a client-server architecture. The second one provides remote tools for image and signal visualization and analysis. The main issue for such a platform is not only to provide an extensible collaborative environment, but also to build a development platform for testing models and algorithms in neuroscience. For these reasons a Grid approach has been considered. Both computational and data Grids infrastructures can be exploited to analyze and share large datasets of distributed data. The architecture has been deployed to support surgical planning for patients affected by drug resistant epilepsy. In that scenario, a complex analysis for a fully multimodal dataset including different image modalities, EEG and video is required to localize the origin of the ictal discharge and critical brain areas. As first results, prototype versions of both repository and application domain components are presented. © 2009 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.