OHBM Neurosalience

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

This week on #Neurosalience, we discuss one very cool and very useful fMRI acquisition strategy called Multi-echo EPI. While it’s been around for over 20 years, only a fraction of papers reporting fMRI results have used it. It can help quite a bit towards increasing sensitivity, mitigating signal dropout and motion artifacts, and stabilizing the time series to allow for tracking of very slow changes. Recent papers have come out showing that it significantly helps increase sensitivity and mitigate artifacts. In fact, several prominent leaders in the field are embracing it as they are convinced it's essential for increasing the reproducibility and ultimately, the clinical utility of fMRI.  In this podcast we cover what Multi-echo EPI can and can’t do. We also discuss the options in pulse sequence parameters, what vendors offer, and fMRI processing, and available processing packages set up to work with multi-echo data. Guests: Charles Lynch, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral associate in Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who received his Ph.D. in 2018 from Georgetown University in Washington DC and has written several impactful papers convincingly describing the benefits of multi-echo EPI for fMRI. Prantik Kundu, Ph.D. is a pioneer in multi-echo EPI processing, having developed the powerful approach called ME-ICA to process multi-echo EPI data. In 2014, Prantik received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He was a student of both Ed Bullmore and myself, working in the  NIH-Cambridge graduate program. He was assistant professor at Mount Sinai in New York before moving to be a lead scientist at Hyperfine (the company that came out with the ultra-low field portable scanner). Recently, he has started in the position of Chief Technology Officer at Ceretype Neuromedicine, a company based in Boston that is pioneering precision neuropsychiatry - towards increasing the clinical relevance of functional brain imaging. Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Anastasia Brovkin Brain Art Artist: Vesna Prčkovska Title: Frida Kahlo - A floral bouquet of pathways Description: A floral bouquet of pathways.