LesionBank.org: An Open Source Platform for Brain Lesion Case Reports
Joseph Turner1, Anish Suvarna2, Vicky Chen3, Elijah Baughan1, Kiana Bunnell1, Calvin Howard4, Frederic Schaper5, Michael Ferguson6, Jared Nielsen1
1Brigham Young University, 2Thomas Jefferson High School, 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 4Brigham and Women's Hospital, 5Brigham and Women's, 6Harvard University
Objective:

To create an open source, web-based platform for aggregating, viewing, and analyzing published case reports of brain lesions. 

Background:

Given the recent surge of methodological innovation using human brain lesion data, our objective is to create an open source, web-based platform for aggregating, viewing, and analyzing published case reports containing both brain imaging and clinical evaluation of the patient. 

Design/Methods:

LesionBank.org provides a user-friendly platform for curated brain lesion reports, allowing search, visualization, and retrieval of lesion images and metadata. The application leverages the Django web-framework and a Postgres database to process user requests and handle the user interface. The application is deployed on a DigitalOcean droplet, and imaging data is stored in an S3-compatible DigitalOcean object space. Currently, the collection includes 163 lesion ROIs and associated lesion network maps that were found from previous published case reports

Results:

LesionBank.org has been launched with a viewer and search capabilities based on both textual search of case reports and image-based search of published brain lesion images. To date, the LesionBank.org platform has been used to successfully reproduce primary findings from an already-published study on amnesia (Ferguson, 2019). Additionally, LesionBank.org has been used to support training of several dozen undergraduate research assistants to identify brain lesion case reports of interest, create digital lesion tracings from published, catalog metadata, and relate brain lesions to their underlying functional connectivity.

Conclusions:

Science: LesionBank, an open source platform for brain lesion case reports, is able to reproduce brain lesion mapping results from published literature. 

Education: LesionBank is able to power an asynchronous undergraduate semester research course on clinical neuroscience.

References:

Ferguson, M. A., Lim, C., Cooke, D., Darby, R. R., Wu, O., Rost, N. S., Corbetta, M., Grafman, J., & Fox, M. D. (2019). A human memory circuit derived from brain lesions causing amnesia. Nature Communications, 10(3497). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11353-z

10.1212/WNL.0000000000208135