Understanding Brain Networks using Functional Imaging

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• Peter Zeidman, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London
• Wednesday 12 June 2013, 14:00-15:00
• UG09, Learning Centre.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Leandro Minku.

Host: Prof. Jeremy Wyatt

Understanding how individual brain structures contribute to our everyday lives is a key objective of cognitive neuroscience. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), researchers generally perform a statistical test at each point in the brain to determine whether its activity was affected by an experimental manipulation. Although informative, this kind of analysis ignores a key consideration: parts of the brain do not act in isolation, but operate as large functional networks.

In this presentation I will show how a ‘systems’ approach can contribute to our understanding of the human brain. I will draw on examples from the study of aphasia, where we have shown how the brain’s reading pathways can be disrupted by stroke, and from studies on memory and imagination, where measuring the connectivity of the hippocampus has given us fresh insights into its role. I will discuss the significant computational challenges that connectivity analyses pose, and present work capitalising on recent developments in the modelling of brain networks (Stochastic Dynamic Causal Modelling), which enables connectivity to be inferred during internally-driven cognitive processes, such as episodic memory.

This talk is part of the Artificial Intelligence and Natural Computation seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Artificial Intelligence and Natural Computation seminars
• Computer Science Departmental Series
• Computer Science Distinguished Seminars
• UG09, Learning Centre
• computer sience

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