Neurosalience

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!

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: <LINK TBC> 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

In this episode, Peter talks with Mallar Chakravarty about the imminent relaunch of the journal Aperture Neuro, which, a few years ago, was created and supported through OHBM.   Here we learn what happened with the first version of Aperture Neuro, what lessons were learned, and what the relaunched version of Aperture offers that is truly unique and valuable to the field. It is non-profit and open access with an APC of 800 dollars for members. It provides an avenue for many different kinds of papers, from typical original research to editorials, tutorials, conference summaries, book reviews, registered reports, and more. It will be heavily weighing the assessment of submitted papers based on their utility and transparency rather than just their novelty. In the future, Aperture Neuro aims to seamlessly support other objects such as code, data, notebooks, and videos, and is currently looking into mechanisms for handling these without compromising on quality or efficiency.   For more information about the journal, go to apertureneuro.org   Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Stephania Assimopoulos   Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com

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. 

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.

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.