BME Seminar: Computational Tools for the Analysis of Brain Structure, Function and Connectivity using MRI

March 26th, 2012

Wednesday – March 28 – 4pm

Bruce Fischl, Ph.D
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
Associate in Neuroscience, Massachusetts General Hospital

Computational Tools for the Analysis of Brain Structure, Function and
Connectivity using MRI

44 Cummington St, Room 203

Abstract: Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology has progressed at an astonishing rate in the last decade, with an array of new image contrasts available at higher resolution, higher SNR and/or reduced imaging time. In this talk I will discuss ongoing work at MGH with the goal of automatically extracting information from these images for the purposes of quantifying normal brain structure, function and connectivity as well as detecting departures from normal trajectories. This includes the construction and use of surface-based models of the human cerebral cortex, the modeling of major white matter fascicles from diffusion-weighted MRI, the probing of the laminar properties of the fMRI signal using models of cortical layers, and the use of ultra-high resolution ex vivo MRI to build probabilistic models of the relationship between microscopically defined boundaries and macroscopically observable geometry.