NICARA stands for NeuroImaging-based Connectome Assessment in Research and Application.
The connectome, the complex map of our brain connections, is key to our individuality, our intelligence and personal preferences as well as our individual vulnerability to brain diseases and dementia. Clinically, impairments of the integrity of brain networks are the earliest indicator of neurodegenerative diseases and a much better predictor of cognitive decline than volumetric assessments alone.
However, extracting structural and functional brain connectivity from raw images is time consuming and requires extensive expert knowledge.
With NICARA, you have thousands of publicly available connectomes at your fingertips and the possibility to analyze your own data by creating individual connectomes on the fly in an easy to use web portal.
The NICARA environment consists of individually combinable modules for building up, browsing, editing and comparing connectomes: