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News from the NIH

SPARC Program News

SPARC HORNET (RFA-RM-21-024)

The NIH Common Fund’s Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program is excited to announce a new Funding Opportunity Announcement: SPARC Human Open Research Neural Engineering Technologies (HORNET) Initiative (U41 Clinical Trial Not Allowed). The primary goal of the SPARC HORNET (RFA-RM-21-024) initiative is to advance the clinical translation of neuromodulation therapies in humans by supporting an open-source ecosystem of accessible technology and tools. HORNET awardees will develop open-source modules that may include hardware, firmware, and software elements that combine to define a neuromodulation system. Applications are due Jan 12, 2022. Letters of Intent are due 30 days prior to the application due date.

SPARC VNS Endpoints from Standardized Parameters (VESPA) (U54 Clinical Trial Required)

The SPARC program has released a Notice of Intent to Publish a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for SPARC VNS Endpoints from Standardized Parameters (VESPA) (U54 Clinical Trial Required). This initiative intends to support a large multisite study of the multi-organ effects of vagus nerve stimulation in humans. The FOA is expected to be published in December 2021 with an expected application due date in Spring 2022. For more information, please see: SPARC VESPA

SPARC Codeathon!

The 2021 SPARC FAIR Codeathon was a resounding success! Highly creative teams spent two weeks developing projects to make SPARC data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). The prize winning teams are listed below:

Grand Prize - $20,000

• KnowMore - an automated knowledge discovery tool to allow users of the SPARC Portal to visualize, in just a few clicks, similarities, differences, and connections between multiple SPARC datasets of their choice.

1st Prize - $10,000

• HuBMAP link - visualization and reporting on the interlinkages between HuBMAP and SPARC ontologies and data; valuable in longitudinal studies and to further the goals of both HuBMAP and SPARC in cross-consortium interoperability.

2nd Prize - $7,000

• SPARClink - provides a system that will query external publications using open source tools and platforms and create an interactive visualization to showcase the impact that SPARC has on the scientific research community.

3rd Prize - $3,000

AQUA - an application to improve search capabilities of the SPARC Portal using natural language processing.

For more details on the teams and projects please visit the SPARC FAIR Codeathon webpage.

NIH Funding Opportunities

Human Open Research Neural Engineering Technology (HORNET) Initiative

Human Open Research Neural Engineering Technology (HORNET) Initiative (U41 Clinical Trial Note Allowed) [Letters of Intent due December 13; Applications due January 12, 2022]

SPARC VNS Endpoints from Standardized Parameters (VESPA)

Notice of Intent to Publish a Funding Opportunity Announcement for SPARC VNS Endpoints from Standardized Parameters (VESPA) (U54 Trial Required) [Estimated publication Date of Funding Opportunity Announcement: January 7, 2022]

The SPARC Portal Report

Several new and exciting features are currently in development for the SPARC Portal! These include a complete site-wide overhaul of the search functionality to offer more user-friendly browsing and also to better comply with FAIR data principles; support for directly analyzing data from the Portal; a unified Portal login using ORCID; new viewers for a wide range of file types; as well as new simulation and analysis services on o2S2PARC; and much more!

As always, details about recently released features can be found in the SPARC Portal Release Notes.

New to the SPARC Portal? Check out our Portal Walkthrough on the SPARC YouTube channel!

SPARC Data and Resource Center (DRC) Dispatch

The SPARC DRC has hosted several webinars over the past few months, which are available on the SPARC YouTube channel! Be sure to check out these webinars and subscribe to the channel!

Segmentation data viewer

Keep an eye out for a new, full-resolution segmentation data viewer coming soon to the SPARC Portal! Explore 3D neuronal, vascular, and anatomical reconstructions on your web browser with this integrated viewer.

Zoom, pan, and rotate in a dynamic 3D environment to investigate the segmentation data in the Neuromorphological File Format from curated SPARC datasets. The FAIR format is fully documented and ready to be repurposed by other tool builders. A related manuscript was recently accepted in Springer’s Special Issue of Neuroinformatics, Building the NeuroCommons. Read the manuscript to learn more about the structural benefits of the file format and discover how you could leverage SPARC segmentation data.

o2S2PARC is growing

with rapidly increasing functionality, onboarded services, and usage. Among the recent additions are:

• Voila Dashboards: Interactively explorables presentations of your data that you can share and/or publish. Dynamic graphics, widgets, and even control questions can all be included, as illustrated in this example using the SPARC Colon Motility Data from Larauche, et al.. And converting your JupyterLab Notebooks into Voila Dashboards can take as little as renaming a file!

• API for computational services: A powerful API for submitting and managing computationally intensive jobs in parallel through o2S2PARC.

• Guided Mode applications: Functionality for converting involved workflows established by experts into step-by-step applications that hide the underlying complexity and instead guide users through the necessary interactions. First such applications are being realized, e.g., by the Bladder Control SPARC team, for the purpose of treatment planning and optimization.

• A wealth of new services for: interactive image segmentation, defining and applying deep neural networks, modeling of visceral nerve stimulation and sensing (contributed by Dr. Calvin Eiber), acousto-neural interaction investigation, as well as modeling of (large) neural networks (from the lab of Kendall Morris), computer aided design (CAD), and much more.

Action Potential

Have opinions on how the SPARC Portal could be improved? We are always looking for autonomic neuroscience and bioelectronic medicine researchers (at all levels, from PhD to PI, and in all ways, from basic research to data modeling and device development) willing to provide input on how the SPARC Portal can better meet your needs. Email [email protected] to let us know if you'd be interested in upcoming opportunities.

SPARC bioRxiv Channel

Keep up to date with the latest SPARC research pre-prints by visiting the SPARC bioRxiv channel.

Follow SPARC on Social Media

To stay informed, see our weekly Tweets and YouTube channel.