Neurological Biomarkers and Neuroinformatics: The Role of The Virtual Brain

Abstract An exciting advancement in the field of neuroscience has been the development of schemes to acquire data at the whole brain level, thus fostering a greater understanding of brain function in health and disease. Yet what we are clearly lacking are quantitative integrative tools to translate this understanding to the individual level. Here, we present a novel neuroinformatics platform, The Virtual Brain (TVB), to effectively model individualized brain activity, enabling the linkage of large-scale (macroscopic) brain dynamics with biophysical parameters at the meso- and microscopic levels. The remarkable consistency of changes in modeling parameters in our studies points toward feasibility to identify potential biomarkers associated with individual physiopathology in stroke and neurodegeneration. Previously, we have provided proof of concept demonstrating that TVB can create the basis for a more deliberate integration of computational biology and neuroscience into clinical approaches for elucidating cellular and molecular mechanisms of disease. The idea now is to create a library of model parameters associated with different neurologic diseases to further the development of individualized therapeutic interventions. In this chapter, we present an introduction to computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics, and in particular, we describe in detail the construction, usage, and relevance of the modeling approach with TVB. Furthermore, we discuss the role of biomarkers in medicine, their special requirements in the context of neurology, and how neuroinformatics can aid into their discovery. As there is a fair amount of technical terms, the reader is encouraged to refer to the glossary table listed at the end of the chapter.