1) Introduction

This purpose of this project is to create a platform to

1. facilitate the human-curation of neuroimaging literature and
2. provide tools for researchers to better perform meta-analyses.

Why Brainspell?

Brainspell is a platform for the crowd-sourced curation and annotation of neuroimaging literature. In recent years, the number of neuroimaging publications has increased substantially. These papers often have poor reproducibility, and they're difficult to properly parse for meta-analyses. Brainspell seeks to combine machine-parsed image data with users' annotations to curate a repository of neuroimaging literature.

What were the problems that we wanted to solve?

Brainspell's original PHP design had problems with scalability, modularization, and efficiency. Queries with over a few thousand results caused the server to run out of memory, and the structure of the code didn't allow developers to access Brainspell's database without scraping and parsing the HTML website. Furthermore, finding PHP developers who were willing to collaborate on the project was difficult, so we wanted to switch to a more modern platform.

What changes did we make?

We rebuilt the PHP platform using the Tornado framework in Python. We also switched the database from MySQL to PostgreSQL, designed a JSON API, and built a user interface on top of the API.