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OHBM Neurosalience

OHBM Neurosalience

By OHBM

The Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) presents the Neurosalience podcast. In this series of interviews you’ll discover the latest developments in techniques for measuring brain structure and function. You’ll hear about how these tools can provide insight into the function of the brain from childhood to old age, and why these normal processes may be affected in neurological and psychiatric conditions. Dr. Peter Bandettini interviews brain scientists of all types and discusses the latest developments, controversies and challenges related to their work in the field of brain mapping.
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Neurosalience #S1E12 with Alex Fornito - A connectomic perspective of the brain

OHBM NeurosalienceJun 02, 2021

00:00
01:04:24
Neurosalience #S4E13 with Daniele Marinazzo - Networks, causality, new ideas to advance the field

Neurosalience #S4E13 with Daniele Marinazzo - Networks, causality, new ideas to advance the field

Dr. Daniele Marinazzo is a full professor in the department of data analysis at the University of Ghent, in Belgium. For over a decade he has been showing us what further information and insight we may extract from brain imaging data - from EEG and MEG to fMRI. He is technically a statistical physicist, but in reality, he is a network neuroscientist and data modeler who is constantly pushing the envelope.

In this podcast he discusses some recent papers that go into how we might be able to improve the impact and relevance of new findings and models through careful benchmarking and well considered experimental design.

He talks about his desire to move from correlation to causation in functional connectivity studies, he discusses granger causality, as well as moving from pairwise correlation to multivariate correlation.

Furthermore, he delves into the limits of hemodynamics - limits that may be pushed back to a degree, as suggested by his compelling work showing that hemodynamic response function, which varies over space, may be estimated on a voxel-wise basis using resting state data alone.

His work in estimating and mapping the Excitation/Inhibition ratio in the brain by using gamma frequency coherence as a signature was also discussed. This has potentially profound clinical and research applications.

Lastly, his collaborative work with the European Human Brain Project towards the creation of the useful website, called ebrains (https://www.ebrains.eu), was discussed, which serves as a repository and tool for exploring shared data and code, as well as providing a user-friendly encapsulation of the project's collective effort.

It is an all-around fun, eye-opening discussion featuring an outstanding scientist who is not only deep in the trenches of network modelling, but also a strong proponent of open science and constant engagement across disciplines.


Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

Stephania Assimopoulos


Referenced Papers:

Mika Rubinov. Circular and unified analysis in network neuroscience. eLife. 2023; 12:e79559. Doi: 10.7554/eLife.79559

 

Reid AT, et al. Advancing functional connectivity research from association to causation. Nat Neurosci. 2019 Nov;22(11):1751-1760. Doi: 10.1038/s41593-019-0510-4.

 

Valdes-Sosa PA et al. Effective connectivity: Influence, causality and biophysical modelling. Neuroimage. 2009; 58(2): 339-361. Doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.03.058.

 

Wu GR, et al. A blind deconvolution approach to recover effective connectivity brain networks from resting state fMRI data. Medical Image Analysis. 2013; 17(3):365-374. Doi:

10.1016/j.media.2013.01.003.

Mar 27, 202401:26:44
Neurosalience #S4E12 with Gang Chen - Statistician on mission to reduce fMRI information waste

Neurosalience #S4E12 with Gang Chen - Statistician on mission to reduce fMRI information waste

Today, we are excited to have Dr. Gang Chen on the podcast. Dr. Chen is the go-to statistics guru for the fMRI community at the NIH and a well-respected scientist worldwide. He is a staff scientist in the group that developed the AFNI software package. As an applied mathematician, Dr. Chen has written a series of insightful papers in the past seven years, bucking the status quo in fMRI processing - essentially saying that we are throwing away too much valuable information by thresholding our data, relying on overly simple and rigid models of the hemodynamic response, not mapping effect sizes, and using center of mass measures to describe clusters of activation. He backs it all up with a rigorous approach characterized by all good statisticians. He is a master in the art of casting a wide net to capture useful data without taking in artifact and noise, finding that sweet spot in data reduction to balance utility with sensitivity. 

In this episode, we hear all about Dr. Chen’s perspectives through these papers, which are so important yet not widely known or embraced by the field. We hope you enjoy it!

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Xuqian Michelle Li

Mar 14, 202401:13:59
Neurosalience #S4E11 with Jack Wells - Noninvasively imaging CSF flow and the glymphatic system

Neurosalience #S4E11 with Jack Wells - Noninvasively imaging CSF flow and the glymphatic system

In this episode, it's our pleasure to host Jack Wells who is a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at the University College London Center for Advanced Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Wells received his Ph.D. in MRI in the Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering at  at University College London in 2010, and since he began his scientific career, he's been working at the interface of MRI methodology and neurophysiology - focusing on understanding the Cerebral Spinal Fluid dynamics and how they may relate to the Glymphatic system. He and his colleagues have been among the leaders in using MRI to image and characterize the glymphatic system as well as the  brain - cerebrospinal fluid barrier. The glymphatic system is hypothesized to be the paravascular mechanism by which CSF is washed through brain tissue - typically during sleep - clearing out metabolic waste. It is an incompletely understood yet potentially profoundly important system where its dysfunction  may be at the root of  disorders that include Alzheimer's disease.

In this wonderful conversation we hear all about Jack's and others' work imaging and understanding the hydrodynamics and spatial organization of neurofluids in the brain.

We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

Feb 28, 202401:15:29
Neurosalience #S4E10 with Nathan Spreng - Cognitive networks and how they vary with age and disease

Neurosalience #S4E10 with Nathan Spreng - Cognitive networks and how they vary with age and disease

If you are interested in working with Nathan, he is currently recruiting for a postdoc! Send your CV to lbc.spreng@gmail.com


Today our guest is Nathan Spreng. Dr. Spreng is the James McGill Professor of Neurology and Neurosurgery and Director of the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University.

As an undergraduate, Dr. Spreng was initially interested in pursuing a major in poetry until he took a psychology class that sparked his interest in the brain. He received Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Toronto in Brian Levine's lab, and post docs with Cheryl Grady at the University of Toronto and Dan Schacter at Harvard. After about 5 years as an assistant professor at Cornell University, he moved to McGill University.

Throughout his career Dr. Spreng has been using fMRI to reveal subtle yet repeatable large-scale brain networks as they relate attention, memory, cognitive control, and social cognition. He has also helped to elucidate the central role that the default network plays in self-generated thought, and in how it dynamically interacts with multiple systems in the brain.

In this episode Peter and Nathan have a far reaching conversation about his work and what it implies, covering his study of age dependence of resting state hippocampal-linked network ensembles, how to move from mapping networks to modeling and understanding mechanisms, the many possible clinical implications of his work, current understanding of Alzheimer's disease, our mutual appreciation for multi-echo EPI, his data release paper of a large multi-echo EPI and structural MRI data set, and much more.

Enjoy listening!


Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Omer Faruk Gulban

Feb 14, 202401:49:29
Neurosalience #S4E9 with Marsel Mesulam - 50+ years of brain research and importance of bubbles

Neurosalience #S4E9 with Marsel Mesulam - 50+ years of brain research and importance of bubbles

It is our great pleasure and deep honor to host Dr. Marsel Mesulam who is a giant in the field of Neurology and one of founders of OHBM. Dr. Mesulam is Chief of Behavioral Neurology and the Ruth Dunbar Davee Professor of Neuroscience at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Professor of Behavioral Neurology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Mesulam received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1972, and in 1976 completed residencies at Boston City Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. After a 1 year postdoc at Harvard University he began his tenure in Chicago at Northwestern. Dr. Mesulam's work has been both prodigious and impactful over the years, as his almost 1000 papers have been cited over 140 thousand times. He has written the seminal book, Principles of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, and has produced many landmark papers - a few of which we'll discuss in the podcast. One paper that we consider a masterpiece was published in Brain in 1998 and titled From Sensation to Cognition. This can be considered as a required reading for everyone in the field of brain mapping as it lays out so concisely and eloquently, a breathtaking perspective of the structure and functional organization of the human brain.
Dr. Mesulam's research is extremely broad and diverse, having impacted such areas as neural networks and functional imaging, Dementia, Alzheimer's Disease, Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), Cholinergic Pathways, Acetylcholinesterase Studies, Cognitive Psychology, Neurology, and Neuropsychiatry. He also developed, early in his career, a neuronal marker, Tetramethyl benzidine, that profoundly impacted research in this area.
In this inspiring conversation, Peter and Marsel discuss his early career and what was important for his success, delve into research culture and the value of opportunistic research, and the value of having the freedom and resources to try many things and rapidly change directions that follow interesting leads. They also discuss some of the exciting early days of Neuroimaging and OHBM. Lastly, we go into some of his current research on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and the study of temporal pole disease as a window to temporal pole functional significance.
We hope that you enjoy this conversation.


Episode producers:
Alfie Wearn
Omer Faruk Gulban

Jan 31, 202401:21:48
Neurosalience #S4E8 with Monica Rosenberg - It’s a good idea to pay attention to Dr. Rosenberg

Neurosalience #S4E8 with Monica Rosenberg - It’s a good idea to pay attention to Dr. Rosenberg

Dr. Rosenberg received her Ph.D. from the department of Psychology at Yale University, where she also carried out her post doc. In 2019, she started as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago and is a member of the Chicago Neuroscience Institute.  She has been pioneering the use of connectome-based predictive modeling to capture individual differences in the ability to sustain attention. Attention is fundamental to just about everything that we experience and do and how we navigate the world. It varies over time and each person has different abilities to maintain it. Monica has developed and used extensively a task known as gradCPT, an easy at first but hard to sustain, continuous attention task that allows moment to moment assessment of sustained attention. She has found two networks that characterize high attention vs lower attention, and these have been powerful for characterizing individuals ability to sustain attention. It's also been useful for characterizing differences in such attention-related skills such as reading comprehension.  She's been delving further into both fMRI methodology and the nuances of attention ever since.

In this conversation we talk about her career development, the great environment at Yale, the development of her exciting and impactful  fMRI-based human attention research. We hope you enjoy the conversation!

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Jan 17, 202401:05:05
Neurosalience #S4E7 with Evan Gordon - Deep Sampling of fMRI Data: This is the way

Neurosalience #S4E7 with Evan Gordon - Deep Sampling of fMRI Data: This is the way

Today, we are excited to have Dr. Evan Gordon on the podcast. Evan is an assistant professor in the Neuroimaging Labs Research Center, based in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Since joining the group and joining forces with what is known as the "midnight scan club," he has gone on a scientific tear, publishing several highly influential papers that make use of the unique high-fidelity data sets, containing up to 11 hours of resting state or task-activated fMRI data for each subject. This powerful approach in fMRI is known as "deep sampling." His findings include insights into unique individual connectivity patterns,  the whole brain use of a novel parcellation approach using boundary maps, and most recently, discovery of effector-specific regions in motor cortex - a finding which is likely to replace in textbooks the classic Penfield maps of the homunculus. 

This was a wonderful conversation where we explored the implementation, benefits, and potential of deep sampling of fMRI data! Evan is not only a creative and productive scientist, but a great conversationalist. We hope you enjoy it!


Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn


Jan 05, 202401:07:44
Neurosalience #S4E6 with Shella Keilholz - Ubiquitous quasi-periodic patterns in resting state fMRI

Neurosalience #S4E6 with Shella Keilholz - Ubiquitous quasi-periodic patterns in resting state fMRI

Today, our guest is Shella Keilholz. Dr. Keilholz received her Bachelor's in Physics from Missouri University of Science and Technology in 1997, and her PhD in Engineering Physics from the University of Virginia in 2004. She went on to a do a post-doc at NIH in Dr. Alan Koretsky's lab and in 2004 joined the department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University as a faculty member. She is now a full professor at Emory University and also closely affiliated with Georgia Tech.

Since around 2008 she has been uncovering new spatial and temporal patterns in resting state fMRI. She was the first to identify spatial propagation of wave-like behavior in the resting state time series and in 2011 coined the term quasi-periodic patterns (QPP) to describe whole brain networks that dominate much of the resting state signal. Recently, she and others have described three such patterns that account for most of the variance. Here we not only talk about her career but also delve into how these quasi-periodic patterns mesh with the current landscape of diverse features of resting state fMRI that continue to be found. She has shown that these patterns may have a central driver and may relate to such things as vasomotion, global signal, arousal state, and attention. In general, there is much more information from basic neurophysiology to cognition that remains to be derived from resting state fMRI, and Shella is among those leading the effort.

This was an incredibly stimulating and fun discission. We hope you enjoy it!

Episode producers:Omer Faruk Gulban

Jeff Mentch


Dec 20, 202301:09:37
Neurosalience #S4E5 with Alex Huth - Naturalistic stimuli, voxelwise modeling, and semantic maps

Neurosalience #S4E5 with Alex Huth - Naturalistic stimuli, voxelwise modeling, and semantic maps

Today, we’re excited to have Alex Huth on the podcast. Alex is one of the more creative and insightful people in the field of brain imaging today as he has been forging new ground using naturalistic stimuli and voxelwise models to create intricate maps of semantic features across large swaths of the brain. His seminal 2016 paper in Nature brought his approach to prominence: www.nature.com/articles/nature17637

Here, Alex shares insights on the value of naturalistic stimuli on fMRI research and updates us on our current capabilities to decode brain activity. During this conversation Alex highlights an amazing tool to view semantic maps in the brain, which can be found here: gallantlab.org/viewer-huth-2016/

Alex received his bachelor’s in engineering and applied science from Cal Tec, where he was also working as an undergraduate researcher in Christoff Koch's lab. He continued on, receiving his Ph.D. in 2013 from University of California Berkeley, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, under the guidance of Dr.'s Christof Koch and Jack Gallant. He went on to do his post doc in the Gallant lab and finally moved to the University of Austin in 2017, where he is an assistant professor in computer science and neuroscience: www.cs.utexas.edu/~huth/
Dec 06, 202301:13:36
Neurosalience #S4E4 with Andrew Jahn - Educating the neuroimaging world with Andy's Brain Book

Neurosalience #S4E4 with Andrew Jahn - Educating the neuroimaging world with Andy's Brain Book

Today, our guest is Dr. Andrew Jahn.

Those of you learning MRI and fMRI analysis - which realistically, should be pretty much all of us - may already know about the amazing resources that he is prodigiously producing online. Starting with "Andy's Brain Blog" in 2012, expanding to videos (over 300 of them), and now his current project, "Andy's Brain Book", Dr. Jahn has been steadily creating a standard and a go-to resource for all of us to learn the nuts and bolts as well as concepts and nuances of processing our data.

Dr. Jahn received his Bachelors in Psychology in 2008 from Carleton College, and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at Indiana University in 2015. He did a postdoc at the Haskins Laboratories at Yale University, and is now a professor at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. There he has been given the freedom to expand his extremely valuable teaching resources.

In this podcast we discuss how he got started in this, how perhaps failing to get a post-undergraduate position at the NIH started him down this path. We discuss the educational resources that he has been producing, and how he draws upon luminaries from Jaque Barzun to Dave Berry for inspiration. We also discuss the wider issue of education in neuroimaging - what can be taught and what cannot and have an open-ended conversation on the future of neuroimaging as well as some of his own planned future projects.

This was a truly fun and enlightening discussion! We hope you enjoy it! 

Episode producers:

  • Alfie Wearn
  • Omer Faruk Gulban

Brain Art

  • Artist: Laura Bundesen
  • Title: Colors of hope
Nov 22, 202301:26:10
Neurosalience #S4E3 with Russ Poldrack - Paradigm shifts and big picture challenges in fMRI

Neurosalience #S4E3 with Russ Poldrack - Paradigm shifts and big picture challenges in fMRI

In this episode our guest is Dr. Russ Poldrack who has been so influential to the fields of fMRI, cognitive neuroscience, and brain imaging in general for the past 30+ years. Russ is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Center for Open and Reproducible Science. Over the years, he has helped elevate how we do fMRI by creating resources and standards for sharing data and code. He is also working to advance the precision with which we think about task design and data interpretation through his Cognitive Atlas project, which is a knowledge base for cognitive neuroscience.  

Russ Poldrack received his Bachelors in Psychology from Baylor University in 1989, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign in 1995. After a postdoc at Stanford, he started, in 1999, as an assistant professor at Harvard University and Mass General Hospital, in 2002 he moved to UCLA, then in 2009, he became the director of the imaging research center at the University of Texas at Austin. Finally, in 2014 he was recruited to Stanford, where he has been ever since. 

In this discussion, Peter and Russ look back into some of the paradigm shifts in fMRI best practices that Russ helped foster, as well as some of the big picture challenges that we face when using brain imaging, modeling, and precision task design to derive new insights into brain organization and mechanisms of computation. Here, Russ also weighs in on the prospects of fMRI for biomarker derivation and the exciting potential for single subject deep imaging. 

Peter mentioned to Russ that this was one of the fastest hours he has experienced in quite some time as it was an engrossing discussion.


Enjoy listening! 


Episode producers

Jeff Mentch

Omer Faruk Gulban


Brain Art

Artist: Mia Coutinho

Title: Represent, Connect, Empower

Nov 08, 202301:15:32
Neurosalience #S4E2 - OHBM 2023 live podcast session

Neurosalience #S4E2 - OHBM 2023 live podcast session

Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) 2023 live podcast session hosted by Alfie Wearn on site during the conference.


In this episode, our guests Ana Luísa Pinho, Enrico Amico, Tim Laumann, and Emily Finn discuss mapping individual differences in the human brain.


Enjoy listening!


Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Omer Faruk Gulban

Jeff Mentch

Oct 25, 202301:18:52
Neurosalience #S4E1 - Highlights of Season 3, DIANA news, and future plans

Neurosalience #S4E1 - Highlights of Season 3, DIANA news, and future plans

A brand new season of Neurosalience! This year production of podcast will be in the safe hands of Ömer Faruk Gülban.

 

Here, Faruk turns the microphone around onto our trusty host, Peter Bandettini, to talk about all Peter’s favorite moments of last season, some interesting updates about the ‘DIANA’ paper (discussed in Season 3 Episode 4), and future plans for your favorite brain mapping podcast.

 

Enjoy Season 4!

Oct 11, 202336:10
Neurosalience #S3E20 with Michel Thiebaut de Schotten - Brain Connectivity and Disconnectivity

Neurosalience #S3E20 with Michel Thiebaut de Schotten - Brain Connectivity and Disconnectivity

In the final episode of Season 3 of Neurosalience, Peter chats with Michele Thiebaut de Shotten. Michele is a full professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris where he heads the Brain Connectivity and Behavior Lab and the Neurofunctional Imaging Group. On top of all this he is Editor in Chief of the journal Brain Structure and Function and, this year, has been the President of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

Having over 15 years of experience in neuropsychology and brain connectivity neuroimaging, he has established himself as a leader in the field with work that spans everything including development, evolution, methodology, and theory. He has been a pioneer in probing brain connectivity and disconnectivity, starting in 2005 with a paper published in science showing that spatial neglect is a consequence of the disruption of communication between the frontal and the parietal lobes, and thus should be considered as a disconnection syndrome. Since then, he has been a highly prolific producer of creative, insightful, and high impact work exploring and characterizing structural and functional brain connectivity.

Here we talk about the development of his career and his ideas as well as the importance of thinking of the brain from a connectivity perspective. We delve into some of his recent papers, including one that highlights differences in various MRI methods to measure myelin, and finally, we discuss how OHBM has evolved along with the role of the president of OHBM, as well as a few things that the meeting has in store for this year.

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn


Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com


Thank you for listening to this season of Neurosalience! We'll be back in a few months time with Season 4!

Jul 26, 202301:14:30
What’s on at OHBM 2023: SIG and Committee Events

What’s on at OHBM 2023: SIG and Committee Events

The 2023 OHBM Annual Meeting is fast approaching! In addition to the fantastic scientific content organized by the Program Committee, many other committees and special interest groups (SIGs) host their own programs. At last year’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow, committees and SIGs hosted events on inclusivity, mentorship, art, and much more.

In this podcast, Peter and Alfie highlight upcoming committee and SIG events at OHBM 2023.

Further information on all these events, including exact times and places, can be found in this accompanying blog post:


Other useful links:

SIGs

1. BrainArt: 

https://ohbm-brainart.github.io/

 

2. Open Science:

https://ossig.netlify.app/

 

3. Student and Postdoc:

https://www.ohbmtrainees.com/

 

4. Sustainability and Environmental Action:

https://ohbm-environment.org/

 

5. Women in OHBM:

https://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/blog/announcing-the-launch-of-the-women-in-ohbm-special-interest-group recent blog post

 

COMMITTEES

1. Diversity and Inclusion:

Kid's live review: https://ohbm-dic.github.io/kidsreview/2023/ 

 

2. Education: 

https://www.humanbrainmapping.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4204

 

3. Communications (ComCom):

https://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/

 

Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Stephania Assimopoulos

 

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Jul 17, 202333:19
Neurosalience #S3E19 with Mallar Chakravarty - Relaunch of Aperture Neuro
Jul 12, 202301:01:37
OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Aviv Mezer

OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Aviv Mezer

Dr. Aviv Mezer is an Associate Professor at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Research in Dr. Mezer’s lab is focused on mapping human brain structures during normal development and aging. In addition, it is focused on developing new approaches to characterize the structural changes associated with neurological disorders. Mezer’s main research tool is in-vivo quantitative magnetic resonance imaging – qMRI. The Mezer lab is developing tools to biophysically explain the brain’s MRI signals at different levels and resolutions: from molecular local sources through cellular organization to the mapping of networks across the entire brain.

In this interview, we discuss the field of qMRI more broadly, touching upon the present and future interpretations ‘in vivo histology’. We also discuss Dr Mezer’s approach to mentorship, as well as the skills that would benefit future researchers in this field.

At OHBM 2023, Dr. Mezer will show us how combining multiple quantitative MRI measures can provide additional biological information about tissue composition and brain health. 

Jul 05, 202333:42
OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Andreas Horn

OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Andreas Horn

Dr Horn is a medical scientist with training in neuroimaging, movement disorders, software development and both invasive and noninvasive brain stimulation and the group leader of the Network Stimulation Laboratory at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital Boston and Charité – University Medicine Berlin. His main interest and research focus lies in the development and  improvement of  methods to analyze brain stimulation sites to study network interactions of neuromodulation in the human brain. He is also the host of a podcast focusing on brain stimulation.

In the interview with Dr Horn we explore how the impact of deep brain stimulation on the connectome can be studied, and how it can be used to improve patients lives.  “In contrast to many other neuroimaging domains, there is a more or less direct translation [..] to clinical practice”, says Dr Horn, and explains how for example networks that have been identified via DBS can later be targeted with noninvasive stimulation methods such as multifocal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), for example to improve patients’ conditions in movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease. Among many other things, Dr Horn also lets us in on an informally ongoing challenge at Harvard University whether structural or functional measures provide better predictions for DBS outcomes. He explains why his lab has gradually shifted away from using patient specific connectivity data to precise normative connectomes for studying which brain networks should optimally be modulated for maximal effects.

In his  keynote at OHBM 2023, Dr Horn will give us a tour through his findings from years of work studying the effects of deep brain stimulation on the connectome across different disorders, ranging across neurological, neuropsychiatric and psychiatric diseases. He will illustrate how his findings can be transferred across disorders to inform one another and how they can be further used to inform neurocognitive effects and behaviors such as risk-taking and impulsivity.

Jun 28, 202323:49
OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Emma Robinson

OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Emma Robinson

Dr. Emma Robinson is a Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Professor) at King’s College London. Her development of the Multimodal Surface Matching (MSM) software for cortical surface registration has been instrumental to the development of the Human Connectome Project’s multimodal parcellation of the human cortex. She is currently developing interpretable machine learning models to aid in the personalized prediction of disease progression. In this interview, Dr.Robinson describes the advantages of interpretable machine learning models, and the methodological challenges she faced during the development of this framework.

Her approach to identifying disease-related changes in individual brain scans attempts to circumvent two of the limitations of traditional approaches: (1) the over-reliance on population averages, and (2) the opacity of “black-box” machine learning algorithms such as deep neural networks. In addition, Dr. Robinson shared that, following her extensive experience working on the Human Connectome Project, she realized that traditional image registration methods may not be sufficient for individualized predictions.

Finally, Dr. Robinson shared how her relationship with her mentors shaped the trajectory of her current career. Her mentors not only guided her on the application of computational methods to neuroscience, but also encouraged her to develop her own methods.

At OHBM 2023, Dr. Robinson will present how her work contributes to improved personalized predictions of cortical features in patient populations and how interpretable machine learning approaches can enhance precision.

Jun 21, 202324:59
OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Emily Jacobs

OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Emily Jacobs

Dr. Emily Jacobs is an Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences and the director of the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Health Initiative at University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in Neuroscience from Smith College. Prior to UCSB, she was an instructor at Harvard Medical School and at the Department of Medicine/Division of Women’s Health at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. 

In this episode we discuss the pioneering work of Dr. Jacobs and her group in leveraging brain imaging, computation, and endocrine approaches to deepen our understanding of the influence of sex hormones on the central nervous system across spatial and temporal scales. She discusses her group’s work using structural and functional neuroimaging methods to explore how the brain changes in response to endogenous hormonal changes, such as across the menstrual cycle, during menopause, or across pregnancy, as well as to exogenous hormones via oral hormonal contraceptives. Through the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Health Initiative, Dr. Jacobs and her group are working towards creating a population-level brain imaging dataset to advance our understanding of women’s brain health across the lifespan.  

Dr. Jacobs also shared her journey into neuroscience research, her thoughts on how science can inform public policy, and talked about her groups’ efforts to improve girls’ representation in STEM by partnering with K-12 groups. This work was featured in the book STEMinists: The Lifework of 12 Women Scientists and Engineers

At OHBM 2023, Dr. Jacobs will highlight the power of sex steroid hormones and the role that they play in shaping the brain over multiple timescales, drawing attention to some of the reasons why it has taken the field so long to focus on women’s brain health.


Comcom Organizers: Elisa Guma and Simon Steinkamp


Produced by: Alfie Wearn

Jun 14, 202336:15
OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Hongkui Zeng (Talairach Lecture)

OHBM 2023 Keynote Interview Series: Hongkui Zeng (Talairach Lecture)

Hongkui Zeng is Executive Vice President and Director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Her current research interests focus on understanding neuronal diversity and connectivity in the mouse brain-wide circuits and how different cell types work together to process and transform information. Through her leadership of multiple scientific teams at the Allen Institute, she has built several research programs using transcriptomic, connectomic and multimodal approaches. What unifies each of these programs is their shared goal to characterize and classify the wide variety of cell types that constitute the mammalian brain, laying the foundation for unraveling the cell type basis of brain function. 


At OHBM 2023, Dr. Zeng will be presenting the Talairach Lecture entitled “Understanding Brain Cell Type Diversity.” Read on to learn about Dr. Zeng’s research, career trajectory, and advice for early career scientists through her conversation with Xinhui Li and Kevin Sitek! An edited version of this interview is also available to watch on YouTube or to listen to on your favorite podcast service.

Jun 07, 202329:14
Neurosalience #S3E18 with N. Voets, and A. Bartsch - Pre-surgical fMRI uses and nuances

Neurosalience #S3E18 with N. Voets, and A. Bartsch - Pre-surgical fMRI uses and nuances

This week on #Neurosalience we have two guests, Dr. Natalie Voets and Dr. Andreas Bartsch, who have both been working together to advance the use of fMRI as a complementary yet promising and important technique for guiding neurosurgery. Along with clinical researchers around the world, they have been writing a massive white paper for the OHBM Best Practices Committee on the presurgical mapping of language function. They were also both co-authors on a clear and comprehensive 2022 paper published in the British Journal of Neurosurgery, titled: “Functional MRI applications for intra-axial brain tumors: uses and nuances in surgical practice” 

Here we have an in-depth discussion of the state of the art of fMRI as it’s used in the context of Neurosurgery. While fMRI is becoming a more commonly used tool for helping inform surgeons of brain tissue to be avoided during surgery, standards and best practices are still being worked out as the technique itself has so many stages including acquisition, brain activation paradigm design, processing, and finally interpretation. Natalie and Andreas are not only trained in neuroimaging, but very much in the weeds of daily surgical practice, so have extremely useful insights on all aspects of how fMRI can be and should be used for pre-surgical mapping.

Dr. Bartsch is currently with Radiologie Bramber, and affiliated with the University of Heidelberg. He’s an MD/PhD Radiologist and Neuroradiologist who studied at Charite Hospital at the University of Berlin, Tufts University in Boston, as well as at the University of Oxford. 

Dr. Voets is an Associate Professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a Special Advisor in Neuroimaging at Genesis Cancer Care. She is also an Intraoperative Awake Neurosurgery Technician at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.


Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Jeff Mentch


Brain Art

Artist: Kai Kiwitz

Title: Mapping the Human Connectome

Description: Mapping the human connectome requires workflows that can deal with ever-increasing amounts of data. Here, the cellular architecture of the human cortex has been analyzed by a deep-learning based approach on a cell-body stained brain section. Visualizing what the approach has learned about the cellular architecture results in stunning images that illustrate the beauty of the human connectome.

May 31, 202301:25:30
Neurosalience #S3E17 with S. Kotz and S. Keilholz - Birth of a new journal: Imaging Neuroscience

Neurosalience #S3E17 with S. Kotz and S. Keilholz - Birth of a new journal: Imaging Neuroscience

This week on #Neurosalience, we discuss the recent editorial team resignations at NeuroImage over open access publishing charges and the start of the new journal Imaging Neuroscience. We have two of the senior editors of NeuroImage, Sonja Kotz from Mastricht University, and Shella Keilholz from Emory and Georgia Tech who give us a bit more insight into the factors leading up to the resignation, and what will be happening moving forward as the editors migrate from Elsevier to a non-profit company, MIT press.

Sonja Kotz and Shella Keilholz have been with NeuroImage for many years, and in this discussion, we also touch on the current publishing landscape, how that is changing as new platforms and non-profit companies emerge to help keep costs low, and the benefits to authors, readers, and science as a whole. We also discuss the extremely unique and special culture of editors of NeuroImage - now Imaging Neuroscience, and how this has been and will continue to be so fundamental to the quality of the journal over the years. Lastly, we discuss the future of publishing - from what will be published beyond just pdfs to the challenges of review and curation as more and more papers are produced. 


Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Jeff Mentch


Brain Art

Artist: Sina Mansour

Title: Dreaming Connectomes

Description: Connectome images transformed using Deep dream AI


Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com


May 17, 202339:52
Neurosalience #S3E16 with Hiromasa Takemura - From tract tracing to systems neuroscience

Neurosalience #S3E16 with Hiromasa Takemura - From tract tracing to systems neuroscience

Today our guest is Hiromasa Takemura, the 2022 OHBM Early Career Investigator Award winner! He is the 26th recipient of this prestigious award, joining a group of investigators who made an impact early in their career, and have continued to do so. Dr Takemura’s work has impacted the field mostly as it has traversed between tract tracing and basic systems neuroscience. In combining those two fields his impact has been enormous.

 

Dr Takemura is a professor in the Division of Sensory and Cognitive Brain Mapping in the Department of System Neuroscience and also a professor at the International Research for Collaboration Centre of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences and the National Institutes for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki Japan. He is the senior researcher at the Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet) and the Advanced ICT Research Institute at National institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), in Osaka, Japan.

 

In 2007 he received a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of Tokyo. Following this, in 2009 he received his M.A. in Multidisciplinary Studies also at the University of Tokyo. Finally, in 2012 he received his P.hD from the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Tokyo under his advisor Ikuya Murakami. From 2012-2015 he went to Stanford to work with Brian Wandell.

  

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

 

Brain Art

Artist: Marc Ramos

Title: Venus Brain

 

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

May 03, 202301:00:50
Neurosalience #S3E15 with Audrey Fan - Disseminating quantitative MRI for clinicians

Neurosalience #S3E15 with Audrey Fan - Disseminating quantitative MRI for clinicians

Today our guest is Dr. Audrey Fan, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biomedical Engineering. She also serves as co-director of the Imaging Core for UC Davis Health's Alzheimer’s Disease Center, an NIH-funded Alzheimer’s research center.

Dr. Fan is an imaging physicist and translational scientist. She develops novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) methods to study brain physiology in cerebrovascular disease and vascular dementia. She has translated new imaging technologies to patient studies in acute stroke, Moyamoya disease and intracranial stenosis.

She received her Bachelor’s degree from Stanford, then her Ph.D. from the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She returned to Stanford for her post-doctoral training, and, recently moved to UC Davis to start up her own lab.

Dr. Fan is one of only a handful of researchers who are wielding MRI to non-invasively extract, with ever more effectiveness, useful quantitative information about brain physiology that is also clinically relevant. This includes quantitative blood flow, volume, and oxygenation as well as cerebral metabolic rate and oxygen extraction fraction with a goal to help guide treatment and therapy for stroke, vascular dementia, and other neurovascular disorders. This is such an important area to work in - as MRI is so sensitive to so many physiologic variables with such a broad parameter space. Even at about 40 years old, MRI has untapped potential and clinical efficacy - which Audrey is working to utilize.

This conversation gives a great perspective of the unique challenges and opportunities of this exciting subfield of MRI.

~

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

~

Brain Art

Artist: Omer Faruk Gulban

Title: OHBM22 Brain Art

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Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com



Apr 19, 202301:11:17
Neurosalience #S3E14 with Stephanie Forkel - Neurovariability

Neurosalience #S3E14 with Stephanie Forkel - Neurovariability

Today, our guest is Dr. Stephanie Forkel, a Donders Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor at Radboud University, studying the impact of neural variability on cognition in health and disease. In 2013, she received her PhD in neuroimaging at King's College in London where she helped establish an understanding that neurovariability is critical for prediction of recovery after stroke. Over her academic career she has continued to develop this line of work and has trained in many different places, including University of Salzburg, The National University of Ireland in Galway, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Klinikum Großhadern in Germany, University of Greenwich in the UK, UC Davis in the US, and CNRS in France. Dr. Forkel is a dynamic trailblazer, a thought leader, and a deeply engaged leader in both basic and clinical neuroimaging and she’s taken on many roles in the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. We hope you enjoy this week’s podcast. 


Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Jeff Mentch


Brain Art

Artist: Vesna Prchkovska


Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Apr 05, 202301:06:54
Neurosalience #S3E13 with Todd Constable - Functional MRI of the individual

Neurosalience #S3E13 with Todd Constable - Functional MRI of the individual

Today, my guest is Dr. Todd Constable, a Professor in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at Yale University. He is also director of MRI Research in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology in the Yale School of Medicine.


Todd received his PhD in 1990 in Medical Physics from the University of Toronto, then moved to Yale for his post-doc and has been there ever since. While his training was in physics, he has clearly become a neuroscientist as well - having been working in fMRI since the early 90’s. He still is active in both the physics development and neuroscience applications of MRI, working on low cost MRI strategies as well as working on more insightful ways to use fMRI data for clinical use. Specifically, he has mentored some outstanding students, including Emily Finn and Monica Rosenberg, who have helped pioneer the use of fMRI for predictive modeling of individual traits. Here we talk about, among other things, about the benefits, power, and potential clinical applications of predictive modeling in fMRI. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Mar 22, 202301:23:50
Neurosalience #S3E12 with Matthew Wall - Sex, drugs, & fMRI

Neurosalience #S3E12 with Matthew Wall - Sex, drugs, & fMRI

Today, our guest is Dr. Matthew Wall, head of MRI applications at Invicro, a London-based company that explores ways to advance personalized medicine.

Matthew received his Ph.D. in 2003 in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of Cambridge and until 2006, performed a post doc at Royal Holloway. He joined the company, Glaxo-Smith Kline in 2009, which then became Imanova in 2012 and then more recently, Invicro.

Dr. Wall is a medical imaging specialist - working on both methods and applications - and mostly using fMRI. HIs initial training was in experimental psychology, but he's since studied vision, pain, fMRI-methodologies, resting-state fMRI, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopharmacology. Recently he’s been involved in research on psychedelics, cannabis, sex hormones, depression, weight-loss, neurodegenerative disorders, and sexual function.

His current role at Invicro allows him the opportunity to be involved in a number of clinical and non-clinical research projects, from commercial early Phase I clinical trials, to pure academic work.

Today we have a broad ranging conversation about the challenges of fMRI in generating biomarkers and how the central challenge is shaping up to be more fully characterizing and understanding the many dimensions of human variability. We also get into a great discussion on psilocybin and his brain imaging work towards understanding how it alleviates depression. We then talk about cannabis, as well as his more recent work on understanding the neural correlates of various treatments to reduce hypoactive sexual desire disorder.


Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

Brain Art

Artist: Dan White
Title: Neurotrip

Author’s Description: OHBM Brain Art Video Entry: https://o8t.wistia.com/medias/kulnjqe2ty

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Feb 22, 202301:19:20
Neurosalience #S3E11 with Lily Mujica-Parodi - Moving from mapping to circuit modeling of the brain

Neurosalience #S3E11 with Lily Mujica-Parodi - Moving from mapping to circuit modeling of the brain

In this discussion, we cover her work on characterizing the variability of coherence as it relates to aging and how this coherence is increased by providing subject with ketones - an alternate source of energy to glucose. We then go into her work in modeling brain circuits and determining where the circuitry is altered across trajectories of disorders. In this context, we briefly discuss her work characterizing the effects on amygdala activation by different composition of inhaled perspiration - either that produced in a fear state vs that produced through exercise. Lastly, we discuss her lab’s work on neuroblox - a simulation program for testing circuit models of the brain and how it may open up the diagnostic value of brain imaging data.


Guest:

Lily Mujica-Parodi, Ph.D. is Director of the Laboratory for Computational Neurodiagnostics (LCNeuro) at Stony Brook University. LCNeuro's research focuses on the application of control systems engineering and dynamical systems to human neuroimaging time series (fMRI, MEG, EEG, NIRS, ECOG), with neurodiagnostic applications to neurological and psychiatric disorders.

One of LCNeuro’s primary goals is to identify key points of failure in the regulation of neural control circuits which, depending upon how they break, lead to signs and symptoms that cluster as distinct psychiatric diagnoses. As a test case for this approach, her lab is working to understand how the prefrontal-limbic circuit “computes” potential threat in the face of incomplete sensory data, across a clinical spectrum that ranges from pathological fear (generalized anxiety disorder, phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoid schizophrenia) to recklessness. A second direction at LCNeuro considers fMRI connectivity as the solution to an optimization problem imposed, in part, by metabolic constraints at the mitochondrial scale. Her group uses biomimetic modeling to predict trajectories, based on biological “rules” of energy optimization, which are then validated against data.  Experimentally, they expand and contract neurons’ access to energy while observing consequent self-organization and re-organization of networks. The hope is that this work will have important implications for understanding brain aging; specifically, the epidemiologically observed impact of insulin resistance on cognitive decline.

Feb 08, 202301:22:58
Neurosalience #S3E10 with Jeff Binder - A neurologist pushing the limits of fMRI and forging new theories of brain organization

Neurosalience #S3E10 with Jeff Binder - A neurologist pushing the limits of fMRI and forging new theories of brain organization

In the episode, we sit down with Jeff Binder , M.D. to discuss fMRI from its origins, to its limitations and its future.

Jeff Binder , M.D. is a professor and Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Neurology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In 1980, he received his BA in Music. In 1986, received is M.D. from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. After further clinical and research training at University of Nebraska Medical Center, Northwestern University, and the Neurological Institute of New York a Presbyterian Hospital, he started at MCW in 1992 where he also began his fMRI research.

Jeff's research focuses on neural systems underlying human language processing and concept representation, speech perception, reading, and aphasia. Much of this work is based on fMRI measurements in healthy people, combined with psycholinguistic and psychophysical measurements of behavior. His clinical practice focuses on patients with aphasia, and he studies the pathological correlates of specific language deficits in these patients using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping and fMRI. He has also worked extensively on applications of fMRI for presurgical mapping, including development and validation of fMRI language lateralization methods and prediction of language and verbal memory outcomes.

In the episode, we first trace his origin story - from a degree in music to receiving his M.D., then to his early work at MCW and the early days of fMRI. We go on to discuss some of the highlights of his work over his career, including his recent work putting forward the idea of the predominance of experiential-based concept representation in the brain, and that the hubs of this representation are within the default mode network. We also discuss a bit of his early work on characterising and mapping the default mode network, as well as his current work on Aphasic patients. The discussion finishes up with his thoughts on clinical applications of fMRI and how this may be pushed further.


This episode was produced by Jeff Mentch and Stephania Assimopoulos.

Featured artwork "Party Time" by Laura Bundesen.

Jan 11, 202301:34:29
Neurosalience #S3E9 - An interview with OHBM's Communications Committee (ComCom)

Neurosalience #S3E9 - An interview with OHBM's Communications Committee (ComCom)

The OHBM Communications Committee, otherwise called ComCom, was created in 2015 to address the growing need to enhance communication between the society members and leadership. It has rapidly grown, both in number of members and in its reach and impact,  fostering a presence in social media, establishing a website and a blog, increasing connections to lay media, and recently, starting up and putting in the time to support the podcast OHBM Neurosalience. In general, communication is so absolutely fundamental in science and in any organization. The quality of how information is captured and disseminated directly determines the vibrancy of a field and community. ComCom has been doing a tremendous job. This conversation touches on all the aspects of what ComCom does and the impact of their efforts. In this episode, some of the challenges, the types of communication that ComCom fosters, its outreach to lay media, and how such committee receives feedback to guide and focus its efforts, were discussed.


Guests*:

Elizabeth DuPre, Ph.D. is a new post doc at Stanford University. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at McGil University where she worked on improving inter-individual comparisons with functional alignment and naturalistic stimuli.  She is the current chair of ComCom.

Ilona Lipp, Ph.D. is a post doc in the Department of Neurophysics in the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences working on postmortem imaging and microstructure. She completed her Ph.D. at Cardiff University Brain Imaging Center (CUBRIC). She is the past chair of ComCom.

Stephanie Forkel, Ph.D. is a group leader at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Bahavior, in the Netherlands. Her team is studying anatomical variability and language recovery. She received her Ph.D. in NeuroImaging from the Department of NeuroImaging in Kings College London and carried out a post doc at University College London.

Kevin Sitek, Ph.D. is a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focus is subcortical systems as they relate to sound, communication, and language processing. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, and carried out his post doc at Baylor College of Medicine. He is currently the Blog team lead.

Nils Mulhert, Ph.D. is a Lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, UK. His research is focused on brain structure correlates of memory and impulsivity, and how these forms of cognition are affected in clinical disorders, such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Sheffield, and carried out two post docs at UCL and then Cardiff University. He is also a past chair of ComCom.


This episode was produced by Alfie Wearn and Stephania Assimopoulos.

Featured artwork "The Great Ape Within" by Zaki Alasmar.


*Note: This episode was recorded a little while ago so some of the names and positions mentioned may be slightly out of date!

Jan 11, 202301:10:06
Neurosalience #S3E8 with Arno Villringer - Pioneer in susceptibility contrast and NIRS and exploring the edges of neurology

Neurosalience #S3E8 with Arno Villringer - Pioneer in susceptibility contrast and NIRS and exploring the edges of neurology

In this discussion, we start with his pioneering work on developing susceptibility contrast for imaging perfusion while at MGH, and then his pioneering work on developing Near Infrared Spectroscopy, and using this approach to help validate fMRI contrast and shed some light on it. After this we discuss a wide range of topics that his group has been working on - falling into the categories of either methods development or mind-body interactions. He has played a major role in many insightful studies that include those using simultaneous EEG and fMRI, and looking at neuromodulation, brain plasticity, subliminal stimulation and processing, and resting state fMRI. He has been perfectly positioned and extremely active over the years to not only add to cutting edge methods and understanding of the brain, but to carry these over into eventual clinical practice.


Guest:

Arno Villringer, M.D. is the Director of the Department of Neurology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. He is also the Director of the Department of Cognitive Neurology at Leipzig University Hospital, and Professor of Cognitive Neurology, Leipzig University. In addition he’s Director of the MindBrainInstitute Berlin School of Mind and Brain.

Arno received his MD in 1984 from Albert Ludwig University Freiburg in Germany and did a short but highly impactful fellowship at the MGH NMR Center in Boston. From 1986 to 1993, he was in Munich at the Ludwig Maximilian University department of Neurology. From 1993 to 2007 he was at Charité University Medicine in Berlin in the Department of Neurology, working up to Vice Chairman. Finally in 2007 he took on his primary role as Director of the Department of Neurology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig.

Dec 21, 202201:39:16
Neurosalience #S3E7 with Seong-Gi Kim - Digging Into All The Mysteries Of fMRI Contrast

Neurosalience #S3E7 with Seong-Gi Kim - Digging Into All The Mysteries Of fMRI Contrast

Seong-Gi Kim, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Washington University in 1988 for investigating blood flow using NMR spectroscopy, and did postdoctoral research at the University of Washington on the determination of biomolecular structure by NMR. Early on, Dr. Kim embraced the difficult but penetrating work of fMRI on animal models. He has since been leading the world pushing the limits of our understanding of the biologic underpinnings of fMRI contrast towards answering systems neuroscience questions. Since 2013, Dr. Kim has been director of the Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research (CNIR) at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea.

This is a pretty intense podcast that has a slightly different format than our typical podcasts. We hit on about 15 of the big questions in fMRI: including the pre and post undershoot, negative signal changes, new types of contrast, fMRI specificity, and spatial and temporal resolution. Towards the end we talk about Dr. Kim's inspired work using optogenetics to provide insight into resting state fMRI as well as how excitation vs inhibition contribute to fMRI contrast.

Dec 08, 202201:42:25
Neurosalience #S3E6 with Michal Ramot - Changing your brain with real-time fMRI neurofeedback

Neurosalience #S3E6 with Michal Ramot - Changing your brain with real-time fMRI neurofeedback

Real-time neurofeedback fMRI is a unique and powerful kind of fMRI involving real time feedback of brain activity to the subject towards the goal of enhancing or suppressing activity or connectivity, and ultimately changing behavior. Michal’s work has taken real time neurofeedback fMRI to the next level, embracing operant conditioning to alter measured fMRI network activity independent of the subject’s awareness or conscious control. Here Peter and Michal discuss all the types of neurofeedback-based fMRI, focusing mostly on her implicit neurofeedback studies.  They discuss the real time fMRI feedback setup as well as the potential applications - for understanding how the brain reprograms itself as well as clinical applications.   

Today’s Guest:
Michal Ramot, Ph.D. is a Senior scientist in the Department of Brain Sciences and the Roel C. Buck Career Development Chair at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Isreal. She received her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the Hebew University in Jerusalem in 2004. She went on to receive her PhD from Interdisciplinary Centre for Neural Computation working under the guidance of Rafi Malach and Leon Deouell. She carried out a postdoc at the Department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science also under Dr. Malach and then did a second post doc under Dr. Alex Martin in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at the National Institute of Mental Health.    

Episode producers: 

Anastasia Brovkin
Alfie Wearn  

Brain Art 

Artist: Joseph Salvo
Title: MRI Self Portrait
Author's Description: “I've been inspired by the Woodland art style, that has been called "x-ray art" for its depictions of subject's interiors. I sought to adapt this style for MRI images. The goal is to provide a glimpse of what lies beyond the surface, while maintaining respect for the subject.”  Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Nov 23, 202201:16:12
Neurosalience #S3E5 with Bharat Biswal - Discovering resting state fMRI & beyond

Neurosalience #S3E5 with Bharat Biswal - Discovering resting state fMRI & beyond

The discovery of resting state fMRI ushered in an entirely new subfield of fMRI and a new era in functional imaging that permeates much of what we do today. Today’s guest, Professor Bharat Biswal is credited with the discovery of this signal. In this conversation Professor Biswal recounts the events leading up to and including his discovery of the resting state signal. He and Peter also talk about all things resting state fMRI, including white matter correlations and potential clinical applications. He even turns the tables on Peter, and asks a few questions of his own. This is worth a listen as he weighs in on the challenges, limits, and opportunities of resting state fMRI today.

Today’s Guest:

Bharat Biswal, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is also affiliated with the Department of Radiology in New Jersey Medical School. He received his B.S. in Engineering from Uktal University in 1989, his M.S. from Michigan Technical University in 1991, and his Ph.D. from the Medical College of Wisconsin Department of Biophysics in 1996 under the mentorship of Jim Hyde. While in graduate school, Dr Biswal was the first to report the observation of functional correlation in the resting state signal - in this case between the left and right motor cortex. This first resting state fMRI paper was published in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 1995 and is titled: Functional Connectivity in the motor cortex of resting human brain using echo-planar MRI.

Episode producers:

Ekaterina Dobryakova

Alfie Wearn

Brain Art

Artist: Paola Galdi

Title: Yarn Brain

Author Description: “I created this figure to debug a piece of code I was writing to map cortical vertices to volumetric voxels and count how many direct neighbours fell within a cortical ribbon mask. My code was definitely wrong, but the figure was cool!”

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Nov 09, 202201:15:15
Neurosalience #S3E4 with J. Park and P. T. Toi - In vivo direct imaging of neuronal activity with MRI: DIANA

Neurosalience #S3E4 with J. Park and P. T. Toi - In vivo direct imaging of neuronal activity with MRI: DIANA

This week on #Neurosalience, we discuss an exciting new paper published in Science on October 14 2022 that caused quite a stir, titled: In vivo direct imaging of neuronal activity at high temporospatial resolution. In this paper, they show clear maps and timecourses of directly measured neuronal activity as it occurs, at 5 milliseconds resolution. This interview is with professor Jang-Yeon Park who is the senior author and advisor to graduate student and first author Phan Tan Toi both at SKKU in South Korea.

In their beautiful paper, they demonstrate a series of stunning experiments that provide exciting new and compelling evidence that the information in fMRI still offers surprises to those who look carefully. This method promises to move neuroscience and neuroimaging forward and in new directions. In this episode, we delve into many of the experimental details, findings, potential caveats, the contrast mechanisms, and possible future directions of this method for more deeply and precisely probing the minds of animal models as well as humans.

Guests:

Jang-Yeon Park, Ph.D is an Associate Professor at Sungkyunkwan University. He received his Ph.D in 2006 from the University of Minnesota. After a post-doc and position as a research assistant professor at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research at the University of Minnesota, he became assistant professor at Konkuk university in South Korea. In 2014 he started his current position as Associate Professor at SKKU.

Phan Tan Toi received his Masters in Advanced Materials Science and Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University in 2018 and Bachelors in Engineering Physics and Biomedical Engineering from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology in 2015.

Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Jeff Mentch

Brain Art

Artist: Pilou Bazin

Title: Accidental brain lion

Description: Beautiful Mistake

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Oct 26, 202259:51
Neurosalience #S3E3 - OHBM2022 Live: The way forward to better brain-wise association studies (BWAS)

Neurosalience #S3E3 - OHBM2022 Live: The way forward to better brain-wise association studies (BWAS)

This week on Neurosalience, something a little different: a live podcast recorded at the OHBM 2022 Annual Meeting featuring a continuation of a discussion of the recent paper "Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals" by Scott Marek et al. This paper set the stage for some great discussions about what it means for the field and its broader implications for brain research (see Season 2 Episode 21 for a discussion with the authors: https://bit.ly/3T1lWu8). For the live podcast we are joined by four leaders in the field whose research is very related and hinges on the ideas around the Marek et al. paper.

Guests:

Avram Holmes, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology and of Psychiatry at Yale University.

Caterina Gratton, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University.

Paul Thompson, Ph.D. is a Professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Radiology, Psychiatry, and Engineering and Associate Director of the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute.

Monica Rosenberg, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Jeff Mentch

Brain Art

Artists: Sahar Ahmad, Ye Wu and Pew-Thian Yap

Title: MindMap - The Intricate Wiring of the Human Brain

Description: The human brain is an enormously complex network of interconnected neurons. Brain activity is orchestrated via information propagation between cortical and subcortical gray matter through fiber tracts that interweave long projections of nerve cells in white matter. This image, captured via diffusion MRI, illustrates the marvel of the intricate wiring patterns of the human brain.

Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Oct 12, 202201:24:19
Neurosalience #S3E2 with Prantik Kundu and Charles Lynch - Multi-echo EPI: An under-utilised tool for fMRI

Neurosalience #S3E2 with Prantik Kundu and Charles Lynch - Multi-echo EPI: An under-utilised tool for fMRI

This week on #Neurosalience, we discuss one very cool and very useful fMRI acquisition strategy called Multi-echo EPI. While it’s been around for over 20 years, only a fraction of papers reporting fMRI results have used it. It can help quite a bit towards increasing sensitivity, mitigating signal dropout and motion artifacts, and stabilizing the time series to allow for tracking of very slow changes. Recent papers have come out showing that it significantly helps increase sensitivity and mitigate artifacts. In fact, several prominent leaders in the field are embracing it as they are convinced it's essential for increasing the reproducibility and ultimately, the clinical utility of fMRI.  In this podcast we cover what Multi-echo EPI can and can’t do. We also discuss the options in pulse sequence parameters, what vendors offer, and fMRI processing, and available processing packages set up to work with multi-echo data.

Guests:

Charles Lynch, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral associate in Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who received his Ph.D. in 2018 from Georgetown University in Washington DC and has written several impactful papers convincingly describing the benefits of multi-echo EPI for fMRI.

Prantik Kundu, Ph.D. is a pioneer in multi-echo EPI processing, having developed the powerful approach called ME-ICA to process multi-echo EPI data. In 2014, Prantik received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He was a student of both Ed Bullmore and myself, working in the  NIH-Cambridge graduate program. He was assistant professor at Mount Sinai in New York before moving to be a lead scientist at Hyperfine (the company that came out with the ultra-low field portable scanner). Recently, he has started in the position of Chief Technology Officer at Ceretype Neuromedicine, a company based in Boston that is pioneering precision neuropsychiatry - towards increasing the clinical relevance of functional brain imaging.


Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

Episode producers:

Alfie Wearn

Anastasia Brovkin


Brain Art

Artist: Vesna Prčkovska

Title: Frida Kahlo - A floral bouquet of pathways

Description: A floral bouquet of pathways.


Sep 28, 202201:19:21
Neurosalience #S3E1 - A new season
Sep 14, 202239:20
Neurosalience #S2E21 with S. Marek, B. Tervo-Clemmens, D. Fair, and N. Dosenbach - Brain wide association studies (BWAS)

Neurosalience #S2E21 with S. Marek, B. Tervo-Clemmens, D. Fair, and N. Dosenbach - Brain wide association studies (BWAS)

In this bonus episode, Peter Bandettini talks to four co-authors from a recent Nature paper on “Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals.” Scott Marek, Brenden Tervo-Clemmens, Damien Fair and Nico Dosenbach discuss their work, demonstrating that to make reproducible associations between MRI measures (both structural and functional) and behavioral measures, upwards of 2000 subjects are required.

The panel discuss the strong reaction across the field to this paper, and how the results fit with the known strong and robust signal from fMRI. They consider why the effect size is essentially three orders of magnitude smaller when trying to pull out differences between subjects. In this insightful, clarifying, and ultimately optimistic conversation about fMRI and the implications of this paper, Peter and his guests go over possible reasons for these extremely small effects, and discuss ways forward.

Jun 15, 202201:09:51
Neurosalience #S2E20 - Turning the microphone around on Peter Bandettini

Neurosalience #S2E20 - Turning the microphone around on Peter Bandettini

Over the thirty-nine episodes of this podcast, Peter Bandettini, PhD (twitter: @fmri_today), has guided interesting conversations with brain scientists of all types about the latest developments, controversies, findings, and challenges in the field of brain mapping. Of course, Dr. Bandettini is an impressive and fascinating scientist in his own right, so we on the Neurosalience production team thought it was time to turn things around and shine the spotlight on Peter.

About our "guest": Dr. Bandettini is Chief of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as Director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core Facility and Director of the Center for Multimodal Neuroimaging. Peter received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Marquette University and his Ph.D. from the Medical College of Wisconsin, followed by postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts General Hospital Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center and Harvard Medical School, before returning to the Medical College of Wisconsin as assistant professor. In 1999, Dr. Bandettini moved to the National Institute of Mental Health, where he has been ever since.

As of this recording, his research has been cited almost 44,000 times, with 5 of his papers having over 2000 citations, 10 papers with over 1000 citations, and 20 with over 500 citations. Dr. Bandettini has also written the book on functional MRI published by MIT Press, entitled, appropriately, “fMRI”.

Peter has been highly involved in the Organization for Human Brain Mapping since essentially the beginning, including serving as President, Program Chair, and scientific advisory board member. Peter is also a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, where he was awarded the ISMRM Gold Medal in 2020, and he was previously the editor-in-chief of the journal NeuroImage, along with serving as associate editor for that journal and many others.

Through all of this, Dr. Bandettini has advised numerous grad students and postdocs, some of whom you’ll hear about in today’s episode. We’ll hear about Peter’s approach to mentorship, to science in general, and to science communication, and to much, much more.

About our guest host: Kevin Sitek, PhD, is a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Kevin joined the OHBM Communications Committee in 2020 and has worked with the Neurosalience production team since the podcast started in early 2021. You can find Kevin on twitter at @krsitek.

Apr 13, 202201:06:25
Neurosalience #S2E19 with Eric Wong - Uncharted territory: Establishing fMRI before it was cool

Neurosalience #S2E19 with Eric Wong - Uncharted territory: Establishing fMRI before it was cool

Eric Wong is Professor and Associate Director for Imaging Hardware at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1991 from the Medical College of Wisconsin where he was the key person in starting fMRI at the Medical College of Wisconsin. 

In this podcast, Eric and Peter start by revisiting when they first met and the flurry of excitement and activity when fMRI was just starting - at the time when they were both graduate students. They talk about Eric’s work in MRI hardware, perfusion imaging, and MRI physics, and then transition into his current work in computational neuroscience where he is spending most of his time and attention. Eric also shares some thoughts on a better approach to understanding human intelligence and why it may not be as complicated as it seems.

Mar 23, 202201:19:40
Neurosalience #S2E18 with Randy McIntosh - Brain modelling and the road to all inclusive clinical care

Neurosalience #S2E18 with Randy McIntosh - Brain modelling and the road to all inclusive clinical care

Randy McIntosh, Ph.D. has been a scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre at the University of Toronto since 1994 and, since the start of 2022, is the new Director of the Simon Fraser University Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology in Burnaby British Columbia - just outside of Vancouver.

Randy obtained his PhD in 1992 from the University of Texas at Austin in Psychology and Neuroscience and did a postdoc at the NIH with Barry Horwitz until 1994. His group uses neuroimaging and computational modeling to understand the dynamics of healthy brains as well as those from many different clinical populations, lending insight and providing potential biomarkers through comparing his dynamic brain models with empirical data. He is also part an international consortium called the TheVirtualBrain which is an open science neuroinformatics platform for modeling the brain. Along with the exciting news of Randy’s new position, he has also just published a two part book called A Complex Journey - which is a sci-fi novel that delves into the complexity of the brain.

Discussion:

In this discussion we talk about his research in modeling brain dynamics, and specifically about this ambitious yet increasingly impactful project involving The Virtual Brain. We also delve into the different kinds of brain modeling approaches and what these different models provide. Lastly we talk about his new position as well as his new institute’s unique goals of more effectively translating neuroscience to all inclusive clinical care for individuals.

Mar 09, 202201:17:24
Neurosalience #S2E17 with Dick Passingham - What has neuroimaging taught us over the years?

Neurosalience #S2E17 with Dick Passingham - What has neuroimaging taught us over the years?

Today we are discussing the general question of how neuroimaging (and mostly fMRI) fit into the landscape of neuroscience research approaches. More specifically we discuss the question of what, over the years, has neuroimaging taught us about the brain? In this fascinating discussion, we work through many related topics and get a solid sense of Dr. Passingham’s perspectives on these - including his views on mentoring, a critique or refinement of David Marr’s three criteria for understanding the brain, the need to put forth falsifiable hypotheses, his enthusiasm for for Optically Pumped Magnetometers, and the need for an array of tools and approaches - not just fMRI -  for understanding the brain.

Guest:

Dick Passingham, Ph.D. is currently Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and is also an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. In addition, he is Emeritus Honorary Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London.  His career has been spent at these two institutions, and from 1991–1995 also at the MRC Cyclotron Unit at the Hammersmith Hospital London. He has published over 200 research papers and eight books. Lastly, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009 in recognition of his achievements.

Feb 23, 202201:18:12
Neurosalience #S2E16 with Grace Lindsay - Computational neuroscience and her book "Models of the Mind"

Neurosalience #S2E16 with Grace Lindsay - Computational neuroscience and her book "Models of the Mind"

In this episode Dr Peter Bandettini and co-host Dr Brendan Ritchie interview Dr Grace Lindsay. They find out about her new book 'Models of the mind' and about the process of writing a book. In doing so, they consider different types of brain models, from simply descriptive to more mechanistic, from too simple to overfitted. They describe the challenge in neuroscience of network modelling - the many unknowns and limited data and how output of the model may help inform its accuracy. They then discuss specific models, such as Deep Neural Networks, and how this type of modelling may progress in the future. Last, Lindsay gives some thoughts about the future hopes, philosophies, and strategies of modelling - how doing it well is both an art and a science.

Feb 11, 202201:06:48
Neurosalience #S2E15 with Pedro Valdes-Sosa - EEG analysis: Past, present and future

Neurosalience #S2E15 with Pedro Valdes-Sosa - EEG analysis: Past, present and future

In this episode, we discuss what was important to Pedro early in his career. He describes his first forays into clinical use of EEG back in the 70s and then we go on to discuss some of his highly creative work in deeply interpreting EEG signals today. Later we discuss his current visiting position in Chengdu, China and a growing EEG database as well as his international consortium. We touch briefly on the current state of medical care in Cuba as well as how Cuba has dealt with COVID-19. This episode was recorded on October 22nd 2021. 

Guest: 

Pedro Valdes-Sosa is the General Vice-Director for Research of the Cuban Neurosciences Center, which he co-founded in 1990. He studied medicine at the University of Havana, and graduated in 1972. He also studied Mathematics in 1973. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1978. In 1979 he did a PostDoc on "Neurometrics and Computational Techniques" and "Biophysical Modeling of brain electrical activity" with Prof. E. Roy John at the Brain Research Lab of New York University. He is a full member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, and the Latin American Academy of Sciences, associate member of the International Center for Theoretical Physics.

Pedro is known not only for his innovation and rigor in EEG analysis but also for his highly collaborative work and passion to improve science development, communication and dissemination in less developed countries. He’s currently flying back and forth between Havana and Chengdu, China where he is developing pooled databases for quantitative EEG.


Jan 26, 202201:30:60
Neurosalience #S2E14 with Lucina Uddin - Mapping the changing brain with functional and structural MRI

Neurosalience #S2E14 with Lucina Uddin - Mapping the changing brain with functional and structural MRI

Peter talks to Dr. Lucina Uddin about the constant struggle shared by all scientists in the field of neuroimaging to find the right paradigms, acquisition tools, and analysis approaches to add insight into fundamentals of brain organization and how it relates to behavior. They talk about cognitive flexibility, Autism, the salience network, and the need for an ontology of network nomenclature so that the field can better communicate, share, and understand findings. They also discuss the NIH’s goal of having a research domain criteria (RDoC) to organize and understand disorders in a more brain data-driven manner. Lastly, they discuss her perspective on advancing diversity in science. It was a fun conversation that put in perspective the many challenges facing functional brain imaging research.

Guest:

Lucina Uddin received her B.S. in 2001 in Neuroscience and her Ph.D in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience, both from UCLA. From 2006 to 2008 she did a postdoc at NYU School of Medicine and from 2008 to 2010 performed a second postdoc at Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. From 2010 to 2013 she was an instructor in the Stanford School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. In 2014 she moved to the University of Miami and in 2018 became, as an Associate Professor, the Director of Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division. She is a Handling Editor of the journal NeuroImage and Senior Editor of the journal Network Neuroscience. She’s written two books, “Insula” in 2014 and “Salience Network of the Human Brain” in 2016. She won the OHBM young investigator award in 2017 and the OHBM diversity award in 2021. Over the past 15 years, Lucina has rapidly risen in the ranks of respected cognitive neuroscientists who effectively and creatively use cutting edge MRI and fMRI. She and her lab investigate the relationship between brain connectivity and cognition in typical and atypical development, welding the tools of functional connectivity analyses of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data as well as structural connectivity analyses of diffusion-weighted imaging data.

For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit ohbmbrainmappingblog.com

Jan 10, 202201:17:34
Neurosalience #S2E13 with K. Kwong, R. Turner, and R. Menon - A deep history of fMRI

Neurosalience #S2E13 with K. Kwong, R. Turner, and R. Menon - A deep history of fMRI

Functional MRI is a profoundly successful and powerful technique that so many of us use. It’s still developing and adding to our insight about the human brain. While MRI was developed in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, it would be another decade before it was realized that MRI could be used to detect and map, non-invasively, human brain activation. My guests today, Ken Kwong, Bob Turner, and Ravi Menon were the first who showed this capability. Ken’s successful experiment in early May of 1991 was arguably the first. Ravi, who was the key player in the Minnesota group, had produced solid fMRI results by the summer of 1991, and I had my first successful experiment in Sept of 1991. Bob Turner was a key player in his physiologic manipulation experiments in Cats. He collaborated with Ken, and also showed results of his own at 4T shortly after as well. We were all there at the Society for Magnetic Resonance Imaging Meeting in San Francisco in August of 1991 when Tom Brady (who headed MGH NMR Center at the time), first showed in his plenary lecture, the crude but stunning jaw dropping brain activation movies. The moment I saw that, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. We have them all here to reflect on those heady days, what led up to their findings, and the bright future of fMRI.

Guests:

Ken Kwong has been conducting MRI research at the Mass General Hospital since the late 80’s when he pioneered diffusion imaging, as well as perfusion imaging approaches. He’s currently associate professor at the MGH Martinos Center.

Robert Turner trained with inventor of Echo Planar Imaging, Peter Mansfield, among others, and while working at the NIH, performed those first critical experiments, demonstrating BOLD contrast as well as obtaining some of the first results in humans at 4T using his home built gradient coil. One of Bob’s major contributions to the field was his early work in gradient coil design - which remains fundamental to what we do. From 2006 to 2014 he was the Director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and is currently retired and living in Cambridge, England.

Ravi Menon was a post doc at Minnesota and a driving force in the effort to produce functional images using a highly challenging non-EPI approach at 4T. He has been a steady contributor to fMRI methods ever since and is currently a Robarts Scientist and Canada Research Chair in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Co-Scientific Director of BrainsCAN which is Canada First Research Excellence Fund, Scientific Director, Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping, and Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging & Psychiatry at The University of Western Ontario

Dec 18, 202101:51:23
Neurosalience #S2E12 with Maurizio Corbetta - Attention, clinical use of neuroimaging, and a provocative theory for what resting state fMRI actually is

Neurosalience #S2E12 with Maurizio Corbetta - Attention, clinical use of neuroimaging, and a provocative theory for what resting state fMRI actually is

Maurizio Corbetta is Full Professor and Chair of Neurology in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also the founding director of the new Padua Neuroscience Center, a highly interdisciplinary research programme centered on the idea of brain networks in health and society.

After receiving is M.D. from the University of Pavia in Italy, he carried out a residency in Neurology at the University of Verona. In 1990 he moved to US, carting out a fellowship in NeuroImaging at Barnes Hospital at Wash U in St. Louis. While in St. Louis, he worked his way up to being the Norman J. Strupp Professor of Neurology, and Professor of Radiology, Anatomy, Neurobiology Bioengineering and Neuroscience at Wash University, as well as Director of Stroke and Brain Injury Rehabilitation at the Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis. He moved back to Italy, to teh University of Padua, in 2016.

Prof. Corbetta has pioneered experiments on the neural mechanisms of human attention using Positron Emission Tomography (PET). He has discovered two brain networks dedicated to attention control, the dorsal and ventral attention networks, and developed a brain model of attention. His clinical work has focused on the physiological correlates of focal injury. He has developed a pathogenetic model of the syndrome of hemispatial neglect.

He is currently developing novel methods for studying the functional organization of the brain using functional connectivity MRI, magneto-encephalography (MEG), and electro-corticography (EcoG). He is also working on the effects of focal injuries on the network organization of brain systems with an eye to neuromodulation. He is known for the high level of rigor and deep insight of his research, and has over 16 papers with over 1000 citations.

Discussion

In our conversation, we discuss some of the key people that influenced him, the incredible team of people at Washington University, as well as some of his early work. We also discuss his perspective on the utility and information in resting state fMRI. He’s senior author of one of the most provocative and compelling explanations for resting state activity that I’ve seen: titled The secret life of predictive brains: what’s spontaneous activity for? Pezzulo et al TICS 2021. We go on from there to discuss his perspective of the substantial importance and profound potential of systems level neuroimaging to not only basic neuroscience but also to clinical practice. Toward the end of our discussion, he highlights how diagnosis and treatment of stroke with neuromodulation can leverage current state of the art neuroimaging techniques.

Dec 01, 202101:19:08
Neurosalience #S2E11 with Anastasia Yendiki - Diffusion based tract-tracing tool developer and validator

Neurosalience #S2E11 with Anastasia Yendiki - Diffusion based tract-tracing tool developer and validator

Guest: Anastasia Yendiki is a faculty member at the MGH Martinos center and a member of the Laboratory for Computational Neuroimaging (LCN).  Her background is in statistical signal and image processing. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she worked on inverse problems in tomographic reconstruction for nuclear imaging. As a postdoctoral research fellow at the Martinos Center, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, she trained in functional and diffusion-weighted MRI. She is responsible for the development of the diffusion MRI analysis tools in FreeSurfer, including TRACULA (TRActs Constrained by UnderLying Anatomy), a diffusion-weighed MRI analysis stream in Bruce Fischl’s FreeSurfer, for automatically reconstructing a set of major white matter pathways from diffusion MRI data using global probabilistic tractography with anatomical priors. She is also interested in ex vivo imaging of human brain circuits with diffusion MRI and optical imaging to both validate and train algorithms for in vivo tractography.

Discussion

In this wide-reaching discussion we delve into all aspects of her work developing diffusion-based tractography, including her work on better algorithms, current unknowns and challenges, her validation studies, clinical applications, and Connectome scanner at MGH. Towards the end we discuss the planned connectome II scanner and some of the most exciting challenges the field faces.

Nov 19, 202101:06:50