Commentary on “In silico modeling system: A national research resource for simulation of complex brain disorders”

The proposal to create a comprehensive in silico modeling system, as a national shared resource, for simulation of complex biologic neural systems integrates perfectly with other new national efforts to develop distributed and federated infrastructures for combining in vivo functional and structural biomedical human brain imaging data such as the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) and those aimed at developing open-source, shared computational models and algorithms building on best practices and National Library of Medicine (NLM) sponsored toolkits (ITK; www.itk.org) such as the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC). Where BIRN provides an integrating network, computational and database elements of cyberinfrastructure, as well as test-bed projects such as magnetic resonance image acquisition and calibration techniques for distributed studies, NAMIC provides novel algorithm research and new applications development. The establishment of an in silico modeling system as outlined by Khachaturian and Lombardo [1] would provide an extraordinary opportunity for national stakeholders in the study, treatment, and cures of brain disorders.