Neurosalience

Dr. Xavier Castellanos is a psychiatrist and a highly influential scientist who has been working in neuroimaging for over 20 years towards the goal of leveraging MRI, fMRI and other approaches to better understand and treat children and adults with psychiatric disorders. Xavier Castellanos studied Chomskian linguistics at Vassar College, experimental psychology at the University of New Orleans, and medicine at Louisiana State University in Shreveport - receiving his M.D. in 1986. He was in the first cohort of “triple board” residents (combined training in pediatrics, psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry) at the University of Kentucky. In 1991, he conducted child psychiatry research at the National Institute of Mental Health under the supervision of Judy Rapaport. In 2001, he moved to New York University, where he is now an endowed Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Professor of Radiology and Neuroscience at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has also been a research psychiatrist at the Nathan Kline Institute since 2006, with a focus on using intrinsic functional connectivity-based approaches in human and translational studies. He was an early advocate of using resting state fMRI and of the creation of consortium-driven databases. Dr. Castelanos is one of the most impactful clinical neuroscientists in brain mapping with an h-index of 124 and over 70K citations. He is a highly collaborative and an outstanding mentor, having won the inaugural OHBM Mentor Award last year. Discussion: Here Dr. Castellanos discusses fascinating career development from his early years to his formative decade at the NIH, and finally to his current position at NYU and Nathan Kline. He discusses his embrace of neuroimaging and fMRI towards studying psychiatric disorders and developmental trajectories and expresses a skepticism with the idea that fMRI will reveal clinically useful biomarkers. That said, he emphasizes that fMRI is deeply useful for understanding the organization of the brain in healthy subjects and those with psychiatric disorders.

In this episode Peter Bandettini meets with Drs Lieneke Janssen and Gisela Govaart to discuss grassroots open science projects. They consider how Lieneke & Gisela got started, what is unique about their group (that it is purely student/postdoc driven), what initiatives they are taking on, the need for open science, and how to incentivize people to embrace open science. For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit: www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com

This is our second episode with Jack Gallant, PhD, a neuroscientist and engineer. Jack is currently a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Class of 1940 Endowed Chair at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The first podcast with him delved so deeply into his approach to assessing fMRI data and his philosophy of doing good science and good fMRI that Peter felt they didn’t get a chance to talk about Jack’s groundbreaking results and what questions they open up. In this episode, Peter and Jack discuss his fascinating and potentially paradigm shifting results on widely distributed, semantic maps in the brain that shift and warp depending on the task itself. Peter’s perspective is that these results open up new avenues for insight into fundamentals of brain organization. The brain is not just a conglomeration of distinct and static modules, but a shifting landscape of representation, much of which may be shaped primarily by our experience in the world. How we or our attention shifts these landscapes is an open and potentially profound question.  Peter and Jack also discuss prospects for layer fMRI as well as the challenges of clinical MRI. 

MRI is ultimately about separating a known but variable signal from highly variable noise. How one does this makes all the difference. fMRI is particularly challenging since what is signal and what is noise is not always clear, as they both vary in time and space. In this episode, Peter talks to Jack Gallant, PhD, a neuroscientist and engineer. Jack is currently a Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology and Class of 1940 Endowed Chair at UC Berkeley and is affiliated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a huge proponent of fMRI encoding or, more generally, careful model building to probe the time series. He thinks that more model free approaches and paradigm free methods are ultimately limited. The discussion gets technical as well as intense at times; while Jack and Peter agreed most of the time, there were some nuanced differences of opinion - mostly when it came to discussing alternative methods for probing fMRI data. Overall, we think it was a fun and hopefully a useful discussion!  What comes through is Jack’s passion for what he does. Given that they only barely got started with Peter’s questions, Peter invited him back for another chat - see S2 Episode 6!

Peter talks to Bob Cox, Ph.D., Gang Chen, Ph.D. and Paul Taylor, Ph.D. about AFNI. AFNI is a major processing package used by brain mapping groups all over the world. It is nearly as old as fMRI itself, and has been steadily growing in functionality. Here we discuss the history of how it all started as well as a few of the challenges of fMRI processing that have arisen over the years. Importantly, time is spent discussing more of the philosophy of data analysis and visualization. A key tenet that AFNI has always encouraged is the ability to drill down and look directly at the data. This ability to flexibly and efficiently visualize the data at all processing steps not only guards against problematic data and hidden artifacts but is also a catalyst for new analysis ideas. We discuss a bit of the future of analysis and the bottleneck for clinical implementation. Guests: Bob Cox, Ph.D. is the creator of AFNI and still leads a team, the Scientific and Statistical Core, at the NIH which helps users and continues to develop AFNI. Bob received his Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from Caltech, and after several industry positions and a short stint at Indiana University and Purdue University, he moved to the Medical College of Wisconsin where he began to create AFNI. He moved to the NIH in 2001 where his work accelerated as he was allowed to grow a team of programmers to further advance AFNI. Gang Chen, Ph.D. joined the AFNI team at the NIH in 2003. He is a staff scientist and the chief statistician for things fMRI and related. He received his PhD. from the University of Arizona, Tucson and has been recently pushing our understanding of variability in large N datasets. Paul Taylor, Ph.D. joined the AFNI team in 2015. He received his D. Phil in Astrophysics from Oxford University, and performed post docs at the University of Cape Town and with Bharat Biswal in New Jersey. He has been leading the effort to incorporate diffusion imaging and tractography into AFNI For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit: ohbmbrainmappingblog.com Keywords: #brain #imaging #software #data #fMRI #research #clinical

Peter talks to Dr. Nikola Stikov, a professor of Biomedical Engineering, a researcher at the Montreal Heart Institute, and co-director of NeuroPoly, the Neuroimaging Research Laboratory at Polytechnique Montreal. Nikola is a physicist, engineer and a strong proponent of quantitative and reproducible MRI for further clinical traction and impact. This involves promoting open science, creating shared analysis toolboxes, and fostering data and code sharing across researchers and vendors. As mature as MRI is, we are still just scratching the surface of what information it can provide. Nikola is a gifted and passionate communicator; this conversation touches on his research in using MRI to derive information about cell structure in the brain and the potential uses in understanding brain connectivity as well as pathology. Also discussed is Nikola’s many initiatives regarding open science, dissemination of results, publishing - and how outdated the pdf is, and science outreach. For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit: ohbmbrainmappingblog.com

This week, Peter talks to Dr. Melanie Boly, a neurologist and neuroscientist who has worked for more than fifteen years in the field of altered states of consciousness such as vegetative state, sleep and anesthesia. In this wide ranging discussion, Peter and Melanie address everything related to her work on consciousness.  They start with some of her early work on resting state as a modulator for detecting subtle stimuli and then get into a discussion on a working definition of consciousness and her work on understanding the neural correlates of consciousness. Melanie is a proponent of the idea that many, if not all, of the fundamental physical correlates of consciousness reside in the posterior part of the brain. Peter and Melanie also discuss Integrated Information Theory (IIT): how it helps us begin to understand consciousness. Last they consider her studies of sleep and how dreaming is not limited to REM sleep.  This interesting discussion straddles theoretical work and practical clinical applications of brain imaging. For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit: https://www.ohbmbrainmappingblog.com/

Welcome back to Neurosalience! In this episode Peter Bandettini talks to production lead, Dr Rachael Stickland. They discuss the best bits and themes from season 1 and what to expect from season 2. 

This episode focuses on layer activity fMRI, an important and rapidly emerging area of neuroimaging research. Layer fMRI opens up the possibility of mapping directional communication channels between active brain regions. Peter discusses the challenges, limits and opportunities of ultra-high resolution fMRI with four leaders in this research field - Rainer Goebel, David Feinberg, Jon Polimeni & Renzo Huber.

In this podcast, Peter talks to Dr. David Poeppel, a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU). Peter and David discuss how MRI and other imaging modalities may play a part in truly understanding the brain as well as what it even means to understand the brain. They discuss David’s past work with Greg Hickok on language pathways, and his work in the auditory cortex. Another topic discussed is the potential impact of David’s work clinically as well as the need to start with, and progressively add to, models of the brain.