** IMES/BCS Special Seminar**

Monday, Arpil 23rd:

• Talk: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm in E25-111
• Reception with refreshments at 5pm in E25-119

Abstract: 

Diffusion MRI has made enormous strides over the past three decades and is now the primary method to probe the living human brain across orders of magnitude of scale: from tissue microarchitecture to the whole-brain structural connectome.  Greatly improved gradient strength and speed, innovative pulse sequences, combined with novel biophysical modeling of diffusion MRI data, now enable the noninvasive measurement of biologically meaningful microstructural parameters such as axonal and dendritic density and fiber orientation dispersion.  In this lecture, I review the development of multivariate analysis methods that exploit the correlation of these microstructural metrics across space and across individuals, leveraging the larger diffusion MRI datasets that are becoming increasingly available in both healthy and disease populations.  In this vein, I present clinical applications to human brain development, to neurodevelopmental disorders such as sensory processing dysfunction, and to concussions and mild traumatic brain injury.  Finally, I discuss two recent advances in white matter connectomics.  First, I focus on mapping the anatomic embedding of the whole-brain structural network, which identifies special zones of vulnerability that are of particular importance in many white matter diseases across the lifespan, from premature infants to the elderly.  Second, I review progress in applying spectral graph theory to decompose the human macroscale connectome into its fundamental “eigenmodes”.  These structural eigenmodes provide a robust and parsimonious basis set with which to describe functional connectivity networks from fMRI and MEG, as well as to characterize the unique perturbations of brain network organization and activity caused by diverse neurological and psychiatric disorders.