Official Launch of NIH SPARC Portal

Exciting news for our participation in the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) Common Fund program "Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions" (SPARC): following the release of a preview version at ISAN 2019, the NIH has officially launched the SPARC Portal on March 02, 2020. The online portal supports the initiative’s ultimate aim to advance the neuromodulation field toward more precise treatment of diseases and conditions.

The portal is an open-source public web-application that integrates the collective efforts of the three SPARC Data and Resource Center (DRC) CORES and serves as an entry point for the public to search, access, and interactively explore the steadily growing collection of data, maps, and computational models generated by SPARC investigators. The portal allows easy browsing of high-impact datasets and computational simulations generated by the SPARC community and outlines available resources, with robust user documentation for the various tools. The user interface of the portal has been completely redesigned for optimal user experience, and the three DRC CORES are now presented on a single, unified section of the portal.

The IT’IS o²S²PARC platform is smoothly embedded and is easily accessible via the SPARC Portal. In this initial version of the portal, o²S²PARC provides computational and visualization services that selected SPARC researchers have already shared with the community. Services range from data and anatomy visualization, artificial intelligence-based methods for CAP prediction, to electrophysiology simulations of cardiac myocytes and tissue. In the near future, the portal version of o²S²PARC will be further empowered with the full set of unique computational neuromodulation modeling functionality of Sim4Life.