Join us for our visiting speaker's talk over lunch in 46-3189.

Talk Title: Beyond Human Brain Mapping

Abstract: Here, we consider the limitations of fMRI as “human brain mapping,” and present a strategy for how clinical neuroimaging might progress through the integration of different conceptual frameworks, mathematical representations, and approaches to data acquisition.  In doing so, we discuss three complementary directions pursued by LCNeuro. The first builds upon work conducted by our lab on quantifying allostatic regulation of neural and physiological control circuits associated with psychiatric disorders, in developing our Neuroblox software platform.  Neuroblox is designed to permit clinical neuroscientists to run simulations of either hypothesis or data-driven neural circuit architectures, to estimate circuit trajectories over time and under different conditions.   The second applies methods adapted from statistical physics towards multi-scale modeling of neuroscience data. This research, usingneuron-to-clinical scale imaging, aims to develop data-driven models of brain function that include insulin resistance and the role of neuron-glial control circuits governing metabolism, with direct applications for human brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease.  The third is our work on achieving the fMRI signal/noise required for single-subject-level generative modeling, which led to our BrainDancerfMRI dynamic phantom.