OHBM Neurosalience

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.

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

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.

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. ~ Episode producers: Omer Faruk Gulban Alfie Wearn ~ Brain Art Artist: Omer Faruk Gulban Title: OHBM22 Brain Art ~ 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.

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