About
Mission
The mission of the Belgian INCF node is to
- maintain and support an active Belgian community of users, researchers and developers in Neuroinformatics.
- provide the necessary training and infrastructure resources to support Belgian and international Neuroscience community.
- contribute to INCF’s activities according to the core competences and research interests of the node.
- collaborate with other professional networks in Belgium and internationally, such as IBRO, IEEE and FENS
The Belgian Node is funded by FWO grants since 2009 and is actively supported by labs in the Catholic University of Leuven, University of Amsterdam, University of Ghent and IMEC.
What is Neuroinformatics?
Neuroinformatics is a research field concerned with the processing and organization of neuroscience data by the application of principles of computer science and state of the art software design methodologies.
Neuroinformatics provides generic and interoperable computational tools, mathematical models, and databases for Neurosciences.
Why Neuroinformatics?
With the diversity of the data generated in neuroscience, going from the genetic and molecular level to cognitive functions and the diversity of acquisition systems, the necessity of developing software tools, standards to describe the data and proper models appears crucial for a better integration of these heterogeneous data for further understanding the brain.
The amount of data that can be generated in a typical neuroscience lab grows at an amazing rate. But our collected knowledge about the brain lags behind, since condensing all these data sets into a coherent picture is an increasingly complex task. That is why neuroscience needs neuroinformatics; the collaboration between neuroscientists and computer scientists to make both new and old neuroscience data more accessible and more useful to the research community, and to advance our understanding of the brain at a much faster rate than previously possible.
Who we are?
The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility or INCF was established by the OECD to further the development of neuroinformatics at an international scale: 17 countries, including Belgium, currently support this effort through the creation and the development of National Neuroinformatics Nodes.
You can read more about the team here.
