OHBM Neurosalience

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

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

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

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!

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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Episode producers:

Omer Faruk Gulban

Alfie Wearn

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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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Denis LeBihan, M.D., Ph.D., is a clinician and physicist, a relentless innovator in the field of MRI and fMRI since the late 80’s, and—as we hear in this podcast—a broad, deep, and highly creative thinker who remains passionate about his work. Denis is the founding director of NeuroSpin in Orsay, France and spends time in Japan as a guest professor at the University of Kyoto and National Institutes of Physical Sciences in Okazaki.  

Denis Le Bihan has achieved international recognition for his truly fundamental contributions to the development of diffusion MRI, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and the concept of IVIM to image perfusion. It is the b in his name from which the ubiquitous b-factor in diffusion comes from. He has more recently demonstrated the ability to image brain activation-related diffusion coefficient changes.

In this podcast, we discuss the intellectual history of Denis’ career. He produced the first diffusion-weighted images, helped establish diffusion tensor imaging, and advanced the concept of imaging perfusion as having an “apparent diffusion coefficient” (ADC) and order of magnitude higher than water diffusion. He has also demonstrated that water diffusion, when imaged with very high b-values, decreases with brain activation. Cell swelling increases the surface area of cells where low diffusion coefficient water resides, thus lowering overall diffusion coefficient. This last result is still debated but generally gaining acceptance with each new paper demonstrating the effect. He also spends some time in the episode talking about his foray into modeling brain function, tapping into inspiration from Einstein and relativity. Overall, it was a fun and inspiring conversation!

Dr. Xavier Castellanos is a psychiatrist and a highly influential scientist who has been working in neuroimaging for over 20 years towards the goal of leveraging MRI, fMRI and other approaches to better understand and treat children and adults with psychiatric disorders.

Xavier Castellanos studied Chomskian linguistics at Vassar College, experimental psychology at the University of New Orleans, and medicine at Louisiana State University in Shreveport - receiving his M.D. in 1986. He was in the first cohort of “triple board” residents (combined training in pediatrics, psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry) at the University of Kentucky. In 1991, he conducted child psychiatry research at the National Institute of Mental Health under the supervision of Judy Rapaport. In 2001, he moved to New York University, where he is now an endowed Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Professor of Radiology and Neuroscience at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has also been a research psychiatrist at the Nathan Kline Institute since 2006, with a focus on using intrinsic functional connectivity-based approaches in human and translational studies. He was an early advocate of using resting state fMRI and of the creation of consortium-driven databases.

Dr. Castelanos is one of the most impactful clinical neuroscientists in brain mapping with an h-index of 124 and over 70K citations. He is a highly collaborative and an outstanding mentor, having won the inaugural OHBM Mentor Award last year.

Discussion:

Here Dr. Castellanos discusses fascinating career development from his early years to his formative decade at the NIH, and finally to his current position at NYU and Nathan Kline. He discusses his embrace of neuroimaging and fMRI towards studying psychiatric disorders and developmental trajectories and expresses a skepticism with the idea that fMRI will reveal clinically useful biomarkers. That said, he emphasizes that fMRI is deeply useful for understanding the organization of the brain in healthy subjects and those with psychiatric disorders.

This is our second episode with Jack Gallant, PhD, a neuroscientist and engineer. Jack is currently a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Class of 1940 Endowed Chair at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The first podcast with him delved so deeply into his approach to assessing fMRI data and his philosophy of doing good science and good fMRI that Peter felt they didn’t get a chance to talk about Jack’s groundbreaking results and what questions they open up. In this episode, Peter and Jack discuss his fascinating and potentially paradigm shifting results on widely distributed, semantic maps in the brain that shift and warp depending on the task itself. Peter’s perspective is that these results open up new avenues for insight into fundamentals of brain organization. The brain is not just a conglomeration of distinct and static modules, but a shifting landscape of representation, much of which may be shaped primarily by our experience in the world. How we or our attention shifts these landscapes is an open and potentially profound question.  Peter and Jack also discuss prospects for layer fMRI as well as the challenges of clinical MRI. 

MRI is ultimately about separating a known but variable signal from highly variable noise. How one does this makes all the difference. fMRI is particularly challenging since what is signal and what is noise is not always clear, as they both vary in time and space. In this episode, Peter talks to Jack Gallant, PhD, a neuroscientist and engineer. Jack is currently a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Class of 1940 Endowed Chair at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a huge proponent of fMRI encoding or, more generally, careful model building to probe the time series. He thinks that more model free approaches and paradigm free methods are ultimately limited. The discussion gets technical as well as intense at times; while Jack and Peter agreed most of the time, there were some nuanced differences of opinion - mostly when it came to discussing alternative methods for probing fMRI data. Overall, we think it was a fun and hopefully a useful discussion!  What comes through is Jack’s passion for what he does. Given that they only barely got started with Peter’s questions, Peter invited him back for another chat - see S2 Episode 6!