Neurosalience

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

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.

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!