Neurosalience

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.

Welcome a brand-new season of Neurosalience! In this episode, Peter Bandettini speaks with new podcast production lead Alfie Wearn about the podcast, the changes this season, and what we can look forward to in season 3. Please send any feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas to ohbm.comcom@gmail.com Episode producers: Alfie Wearn Anastasia Brovkin Stephania Assimopoulos. Brain Art Artist: Sina Mansour Title: Dreaming Connectomes Description: Connectome images transformed using Deep dream AI

In this bonus episode, Peter Bandettini talks to four co-authors from a recent Nature paper on “Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals.” Scott Marek, Brenden Tervo-Clemmens, Damien Fair and Nico Dosenbach discuss their work, demonstrating that to make reproducible associations between MRI measures (both structural and functional) and behavioral measures, upwards of 2000 subjects are required. The panel discuss the strong reaction across the field to this paper, and how the results fit with the known strong and robust signal from fMRI. They consider why the effect size is essentially three orders of magnitude smaller when trying to pull out differences between subjects. In this insightful, clarifying, and ultimately optimistic conversation about fMRI and the implications of this paper, Peter and his guests go over possible reasons for these extremely small effects, and discuss ways forward.

Over the thirty-nine episodes of this podcast, Peter Bandettini, PhD (twitter: @fmri_today), has guided interesting conversations with brain scientists of all types about the latest developments, controversies, findings, and challenges in the field of brain mapping. Of course, Dr. Bandettini is an impressive and fascinating scientist in his own right, so we on the Neurosalience production team thought it was time to turn things around and shine the spotlight on Peter. About our "guest": Dr. Bandettini is Chief of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as Director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core Facility and Director of the Center for Multimodal Neuroimaging. Peter received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Marquette University and his Ph.D. from the Medical College of Wisconsin, followed by postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts General Hospital Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center and Harvard Medical School, before returning to the Medical College of Wisconsin as assistant professor. In 1999, Dr. Bandettini moved to the National Institute of Mental Health, where he has been ever since. As of this recording, his research has been cited almost 44,000 times, with 5 of his papers having over 2000 citations, 10 papers with over 1000 citations, and 20 with over 500 citations. Dr. Bandettini has also written the book on functional MRI published by MIT Press, entitled, appropriately, “fMRI”. Peter has been highly involved in the Organization for Human Brain Mapping since essentially the beginning, including serving as President, Program Chair, and scientific advisory board member. Peter is also a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, where he was awarded the ISMRM Gold Medal in 2020, and he was previously the editor-in-chief of the journal NeuroImage, along with serving as associate editor for that journal and many others. Through all of this, Dr. Bandettini has advised numerous grad students and postdocs, some of whom you’ll hear about in today’s episode. We’ll hear about Peter’s approach to mentorship, to science in general, and to science communication, and to much, much more. About our guest host: Kevin Sitek, PhD, is a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Kevin joined the OHBM Communications Committee in 2020 and has worked with the Neurosalience production team since the podcast started in early 2021. You can find Kevin on twitter at @krsitek.

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.