[BIC-announce] Special lecture: "Meta-analytical functional connectivity mapping and functional data-mining"

[R. ADALAT]

Date: Tuesday 23 Feb. 2010.
Time: 11:00 AM.
Venue: de GrandPre Communication Center


On behalf of Dr. Alan Evans:

Dr. Simon Eickhoff from Universitätsklinikum Aachen in Germany is visiting
the Brain Imaging Centre and will give a talk, next Tuesday morning. Below
is a summary.


*Title of the presentation:* "Meta-analytical functional connectivity
mapping and functional data-mining"

*Abstract:* Brain connectivity has many aspects. Most commonly, three
concepts are distinguished, namely structural (assessed using diffusion
tensor imaging), functional (assessed by resting state correlations) and
effective (models of interacting regions) connectivity. The advent of
large-scale databases on neuroimaging results, however, has created the
opportunity for assessing a completely different aspect of connectivity,
namely task-based functional connectivity as defined by co-activation
patterns. The basic idea, which will be illustrated in this talk, is to
identify those regions, which co-activate above chance with a given
seed-region across many hundreds of neuroimaging studies. Both theory and
applications of this approach will be demonstrated, including a comparison
of meta-analytical connectivity mapping to resting state fMRI analysis and
probabilistic DTI tractography. The talk will close with a short overview on
the possibilities for functional datamining using brain-activation
databases. Using the meta-data archived with the respective activation
coordinates, functional inferences on the role of a given brain area can be
performed that allow the objective interpretation of, e.g., morphomatric
data. Moreover, this approach allows to test for functional components of
co-activated networks and hence contextual-influences on co-activation
probabilities.

*About Simon*: Simon studied medicine in Aachen, Sheffield, Sydney and
London. Received his PhD in neuroanatomy in 2006, following work on brain
histology and structure-function correlations at the Research Center Jülich,
Germany under professor Karl Zilles. He also worked as a post-doc in Zilles'
lab, using functional imaging and histological approaches. Since 2008 he is
an assistant professor in Psychiatry at the RWTH Aachen while also
continuing research at the Research Center Jülich, mainly focusing an action
control and brain connectivity.
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