Guest blogger: Professor Menno Witter
Question:
What’s the core difference between “computational neuroscience” and “neuroinformatics” ? Are they used interchangeably ?
Answer:
Neuroinformatics stands for the meeting between neuroscience and informationscience and it includes a number of different approaches to 
understanding the brain including to a large extent what is defined by computational neuroscience.
Computational neuroscience aims to give quantitative descriptions of functionally and biologically realistic neurons/neuronal networks and to capture those in realistic models that can be used to phrase new hypotheses to be experimentally tested. This field is also often loosely referred to as computational modeling within a neuroscience context.
Neuroinformatics in addition comprises the development of tools and databases to manage and share the overwhelming amount of neuroscientific data, as well as the development of tools to analyze these data. The latter includes tools for complex multidimensional analyses of electrophysiological data or the complex statistics needed to analyze functional imaging data. The website of the International Neuroinfromatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) is a good resource for more information. www. incf.org
This was first featured on our website 19.04.2010