EBRAINS Services for Health Data in the Cloud
The HealthDataCloud aims to provide EBRAINS services for sensitive data. Our consortium comprises a mixture of existing Human Brain Project (HBP)/EBRAINS infrastructure partners and leading health data service providers that have recently joined the HBP. The consortium is coordinated by Charité University Medicine Berlin, Europe’s largest University hospital. The foundation for the EBRAINS HealthDataCloud is an existing GDPR compliant and EBRAINS interoperable Virtual Research Environment (VRE) – located at the Charité - that provides a secure and scalable data platform enabling multi-institutional research teams to store, share and analyze complex multi-modal health datasets.
GDPR READY
The VRE has undergone a successful GDPR Service Readiness Audit
The EBRAINS HealthDataCloud addresses the design principles
and requirements of the EBRAINS Services for Sensitive Data
Federated research data ecosystem that enables neuroscience research consortia across Europe and beyond to collect, process and share sensitive data with GDPR-compliance.
Interoperable with EBRAINS research infrastructure and services, built upon FAIR data principles and open standards.
Seamless access to high performance computing and analytics using encryption and sandboxing for data protection.
Built on a robust and proven system architecture that provides agility and scalability to address evolving research data needs.
HealthDataCloud Architecture
The EBRAINS HealthDataCloud is a federation of interoperable nodes including a central node deployed at EBRAINS RI and an expandable set of satellite nodes deployed at hospitals, research institutes and computing centres. Nodes generally share a common system architecture based on the Charité VRE, enabling research consortia to manage and process data while making data discoverable and shareable on the EBRAINS Knowledge Graph.
GDPR-compliant governance and data protection framework
The processing of personal health data requires a high degree of data protection to guarantee the privacy rights of natural persons under the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Privacy by design and by default is addressed by a coordinated network of governance and oversight mechanisms, technical and organizational measures, engagement of data protection and research ethics authorities, and communication and transparency with data subjects.
Interoperability of Core Services
The foundation for the EBRAINS HealthDataCloud is the GDPR-compliant and EBRAINS interoperable Virtual Research Environment (VRE), located at the Charité University Medicine Berlin, providing a secure and scalable data platform enabling multi-institutional research teams to store, share and analyze complex multi-modal health datasets. The VRE is an innovative project that co-designs a research platform for sensitive data in close interaction and continuous inclusion of the scientific community.
FAIR Data Principles
HealthDataCloud services for sensitive data promote practices to
ensure that data
are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
Metadata capture, annotation and provenance tracking
Advanced search tools and knowledge graph interface
Support for open data standards (e.g., OpenMINDS, BIDS)
Support for common open-source tools and services for analytics and collaboration
Reusable data protection compliance templates for typical data processing and data sharing use cases
Interoperability with EBRAINS services and large-scale computing centres
Consortium Partner Organizations
Germany
Germany
Switzerland
Germany
Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)
Spain
Sweden
Norway
Greece
Switzerland
