TReNDS

fMRI Acquisition and Analysis Course
2023-12-06 - 2023-12-08 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Course website: https://sites.google.com/dartmouth.edu/mind-fmri-course/home?authuser=0

The course faculty include:
Kent Kiehl (Mind Research Network & University of New Mexico)
Vince Calhoun (Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University)
Tor Wager (Dartmouth College, Department of Biological & Brain Sciences)

The course is designed for fMRI researchers who range from beginning to intermediate skill levels. It will provide those who are just getting started with fMRI a comprehensive set of tools and software to get started with your own studies, and those who are more advanced will benefit from custom code and supplements to standard analyses developed by the instructors. We cover Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM12), independent component analyses (ICA) of fMRI data, mediation analysis of fMRI, and statistical nonparametric mapping (SnPM). We provide comprehensive coverage of all aspects of experimental design, image acquisition, image preprocessing, and analysis using the general linear model and ICA.

The course is unique in that it pairs interactive lectures with hands-on demonstrations and work-through sessions. Each student works on their own laptop. Software will be installed on each student’s laptop during the beginning of the course, including Matlab (a trial version), SPM12, the Group ICA of fMRI Toolbox (GIFT), and related SPM toolboxes, including statistical nonparametric mapping (SnPM) and the multi-level mediation fMRI toolbox (M3). In addition, alongside the lectures, participants will be trained to analyze example fMRI data on their laptops using these tools. The course will be small and interactive, with many opportunities to work closely with the faculty. Registration will be on a first-come, first-served basis; we apologize in advance if we cannot accommodate all who wish to attend, but we will admit as many people as possible given the interactive nature of the course.

Dates and Time:

December 6-8, 2023

Virtual location

Details provided upon registration.

Alzheimer's Music Fest
2022-02-04 18:00 - 23:30 UTC | buckhead theater, 3110 Roswell Rd NE, Atlanta, GA, 30305
RESCHEDULED: this event has been rescheduled for February 4th, 2021.

TReNDS is a proud sponsor and will be an attendee of the 2021 Alzheimer’s Music Fest.

Help make a difference, and have fun doing it! After hosting the Alzheimer’s Music Fest for the past 8 years in the Atlanta area and beyond, founder/singer/songwriter, Vince Albert Zangaro, and Dementia Spotlight Foundation are thrilled to bring this important cause and fundraiser back to Georgia.

Featuring a few of the most iconic bands to come out of Georgia—Cracker, Arrested Development, and Drivin n Cryin. Join us for a day of amazing music, food/drink, laughs and loads of fun. Visit our vendor displays and learn more about Dementia/Alzheimer’s Disease and its impact on our nation and community.

More than 6 million Americans & 15 million caregivers are living with Dementia today. Without a cure in our near future, we must take action for change and focus on providing care. Caring for persons and families living with dementia is overwhelming and costly. Through our past music festivals, Dementia Spotlight Foundation has gifted over 7,000 hours of free respite care to families living with dementia.

Help us do more! With your purchase of just one general admission festival ticket, we will be able to gift 2 hours of respite relief for a family. A purchase of one VIP ticket provides 4 hours of respite relief OR supports 8 individuals with ongoing support group sessions. A simple way to help and have fun at the same time! To learn more about us and how to support persons and families living with Dementia, go to www.dementiaspotlightfoundation.org.

Musical Talent on two great stages:

On Main Stage:

Zangaro (6:00-6:30)

Gurufish (6:45-7:30)

Cracker (8:00-9:15)

Arrested Development (9:45-11:00)

Drivin N’ Cryin (11:30-12:45am)

On Cotton Club Stage:

DynaGroove

Morgan Rowe

Folk Chops

Ralph Proddenbery & Donna Hopkins

Pls Pls

Age Policy – All Ages

Guests will be admitted on a first come, first served basis. Admission will not be permitted after the venue reaches capacity.

Guests are prohibited from bringing weapons into the venue. Weapons include, but are not limited to, the following: firearms, explosives, stun guns, handcuffs, brass knuckles, sticks, clubs, batons, martial arts instruments, pepper spray, tear gas, and knives. ANYONE IN POSSESSION OF A PROHIBITED ITEM WILL BE ASKED TO LEAVE AND/OR DENIED ADMISSION.

COVID-19: Tabernacle is adhering to the latest local and CDC guidelines to ensure artist, guest, and staff safety. Face coverings are mandatory and MUST be worn at all times, except while eating and drinking. Additional safety protocols include temperature checks of guests and staff, hand sanitizer throughout the venue, venue staff equipped with PPE, reduced capacity and social distancing, continuous cleaning and sanitization throughout the event, and cashless transactions whenever possible. We are following the latest guidance from local health officials to ensure your safety during the show. What you can expect from us:

Hand sanitizer available throughout our venue
Our team will be geared up with masks and gloves
Reduced capacity and implemented social distancing
Continuously cleaning & sanitizing our venue throughout the show

Neuroscience Ask Me Anything
2021-03-18 16:00 - 17:00 | Online
Join us for a virtual neuroscience AMA, part of the Dana Foundation’s Brain Awareness Week. Our panel of neuro and data science experts will answer our precollected questions, and have an open Q&A.

Thursday, March 18th, 4-5pm EST.

Link to join this event: https://bit.ly/3qfEeIO

News from the Frontline: Maria Misiura
2020-11-13 15:00 - 16:30 | Online
Join us, Friday, Friday, November 13, 2020, at 3 p.m. EST, for an exciting virtual talk by Maria Misiura entitled “Decoding the Disparity: A discussion of race, connectivity, & white matter hyperintensities in Alzheimer’s Disease” as part of “News from the Frontline: Trainee-focused talk series”

Racial disparities exist within Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) such that African Americans are twice as likely as N

on-Hispanic Whites to develop the disease in their lifetime. Evidence suggests that African Americans do indeed represent a unique phenotype of Alzheimer’s disease, for which prevalence of risk factors in this population does not fully explain. In this presentation I will cover my dissertation work which includes an analysis of functional connectivity in the default mode network & in putamen networks, and the role of race in the relationship between connectivity and AD biomarkers. I will also include a discussion of regional hyperintensities and race.

Maria is a graduate student in the department of Psychology at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. She works jointly in Imaging Genetics & Informatics Lab from Georgia State University and Hu Biomarker Lab from Emory University.

Meeting Information

https://gsumeetings.webex.com/gsumeetings/j.php?MTID=m7339def8a492f39ed781937a5ef1c582

Friday, Nov 13, 2020 3:00 pm | 1 hour 30 minutes | (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Meeting number: 120 767 0557

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Brain Space Initiative Talk Series: Shella Keilholz
2020-11-06 11:00 - 12:30 | Online
Join us, Friday, November 6th, 2020, at 11 AM EDT for an exciting virtual talk by Dr. Shella Keilholz entitled: “Disentangling the intrinsic functional architecture of the brain” as part of the activities of the Brain Space Initiative, co-sponsored by the Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) and the Data Science Initiative, IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Disentangling the intrinsic functional architecture of the brain

The brain has all of the hallmarks of a complex system, with meaningful activity occurring at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. When measured with resting state fMRI, all of this activity is compressed into a single measurement of the resulting hemodynamic response for each voxel at each time point. However, by leveraging the spatial, temporal and spectral properties of different types of activity, we may be able to identify signatures in the rs-fMRI signal. In this talk, I will describe some of the types of activity that we expect to contribute to the rs-fMRI signal and features that might allow us to selectively extract them for use in research or the clinic.

Biosketch: Dr. Shella D. Keilholz received her B.S. degree in physics from the University of Missouri Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology) and her Ph.D. degree in engineering physics at the University in Virginia. Her thesis focused on quantitative measurements of perfusion with arterial spin labeling MRI. After graduation, she went to Dr. Alan Koretsky’s lab at the NIH as a Postdoctoral Researcher to learn functional neuroimaging. She is currently a Professor in the joint Emory/Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering Department, Atlanta, GA, USA and Program Director for the 9.4 T MRI. Her research seeks to elucidate the neurophysiological processes that underlie the BOLD signal and develop analytical techniques that leverage spatial and temporal information to separate contributions from different sources.

Recommended Articles:

· Zhang X, Pan WJ, Keilholz SD. The relationship between BOLD and neural activity arises from temporally sparse events. Neuroimage. 2020 Feb 15;207:116390. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116390. Epub 2019 Nov 27. PMID: 31785420; PMCID: PMC7252681.

· Kashyap A, Keilholz S. Dynamic properties of simulated brain network models and empirical resting-state data. Netw Neurosci. 2019 Feb 1;3(2):405-426. doi: 10.1162/netn_a_00070. PMID: 30793089; PMCID: PMC6370489.

· Abbas A, Belloy M, Kashyap A, Billings J, Nezafati M, Schumacher EH, Keilholz S. Quasi-periodic patterns contribute to functional connectivity in the brain. Neuroimage. 2019 May 1;191:193-204. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.01.076. Epub 2019 Feb 10. PMID: 30753928; PMCID: PMC6440826.

· Yousefi B, Shin J, Schumacher EH, Keilholz SD. Quasi-periodic patterns of intrinsic brain activity in individuals and their relationship to global signal. Neuroimage. 2018 Feb 15;167:297-308. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.11.043. Epub 2017 Nov 22. PMID: 29175200; PMCID: PMC5845807.

· Thompson GJ, Pan WJ, Keilholz SD. Different dynamic resting state fMRI patterns are linked to different frequencies of neural activity. J Neurophysiol. 2015 Jul;114(1):114-24. doi: 10.1152/jn.00235.2015. Epub 2015 Jun 3. Erratum in: J Neurophysiol. 2015 Dec;114(6):3400. PMID: 26041826; PMCID: PMC4507971.

Meeting information:

Friday, Oct 23, 2020, 11:00 am | 1 hour 30 minutes | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Meeting number: 120 048 3374

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Brain Space Intitiative: Dr. Dante R. Chialvo
2020-10-23 11:00 - 12:00 | Online
Join us, Friday, October 23rd, 2020, at 11 AM EDT for an exciting virtual talk by Dr. Dante Chialvo entitled: “Everything you wish to know about critical brain dynamics but are afraid to ask.”
Everything you wish to know about critical brain dynamics but are afraid to ask
We discuss recent attempts to understand complex brain dynamics at large scale using approaches from statistical physics. The motivation to adopt this approach is rooted in a more general question: “Why life is complex and –most importantly– what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature?” This fundamental problem “is screaming to be answered but seldom is even being asked”, paraphrasing the late Per Bak.
In this lecture we will justify the approach by reviewing our attempts across several scales to understand the origins of complex biological problems from the perspective of critical phenomena. We will then offer an overview of the experimental and numerical results pertaining to complex aspects of large scale brain dynamics.
Biosketch: Dr. Dante R. Chialvo received his diploma in 1982 from the National University of Rosario, in Argentina. In 1985 was appointed Professor of the Department of Physiology of the University of Rosario. From 1987 to 1992 was Associate Professor in the State University of New York (Syracuse, NY) in the Department of Pharmacology and latter in the Computational Neuroscience Program. Between 1992 and 1995 was associated with the Santa Fe Institute for the Sciences of Complexity, in Santa Fe, New México. Until 2010, he was Full Professor at Northwestern University (Chicago), and UCLA, when he returned to Argentina as Principal Investigator of Conicet (Argentina).
Currently he is Full Professor and head of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences (Cemsc3) at the UNSAM (Universidad Nacional de San Martin) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Throughout these years, he has been Visiting Professor at numerous universities including Wuerzburg University (Germany), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), The Rockefeller University (U.S.A.), University of the Balearic Islands, University of Barcelona, University Complutense of Madrid, (Spain), Naples (Italy) and University of Rosario, University of Cordoba (Argentina), Universidad Mayor de San Andres, La Paz, (Bolivia) , Jagellonian Univ. (Krakow) among others.
Dr. Chialvo has published more than 100 scientific papers, all dedicated to understand natural phenomena from the point of view of Nonlinear Dynamics of Complex Systems. His work covers a wide range of topics, including the mathematical modeling of cardiac arrhythmias, the study of molecular motors as stochastic ratchets, neural coding, and self-organization and collective phenomena in ants swarms, brain and communities, among others. In 2005 he was the recipient of a Fulbright US Scholar Award (2005), in 2006 the Distinguished Visiting Professor of the University Complutense, (Psychology Department), Madrid, Spain, Visiting Professor Award of the Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli, Aversa Italy and elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007.
Recommended Articles:
· Organization, Development and Function of Complex Brain Networks. Sporns O, Chialvo DR, Kaiser M & Hilgetag CC. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8 (9): 418– 425 (2004). (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.07.008)

· Scale-free brain functional networks. Eguiluz V, Chialvo DR, Cecchi G, Baliki M, Apkarian AV. Phys. Rev. Letters 92, 018102 (2005). (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.018102)

· Emergent complex neural dynamics, Chialvo DR. Nature Physics 6, 744–750 (2010). (https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1803)

· What kind of noise is brain noise: anomalous scaling behavior of the resting brain activity fluctuations. D Fraiman, DR Chialvo Frontiers in physiology 3, 307 (2012). (https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2012.00307)

· Criticality in large-scale brain fMRI dynamics unveiled by a novel point process analysis. E Tagliazucchi, P Balenzuela, D. Fraiman , DR Chialvo. Frontiers in physiology 3, 15 (2012). (https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2012.00015)

· Brain organization into resting state networks emerges at criticality on a model of the human connectome. A Haimovici, E Tagliazucchi, P Balenzuela, DR Chialvo. Physical review letters 110 (17), 178101 (2013). (https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.178101).

· Life at the edge: Complexity and criticality in biological function. DR Chialvo, Acta Physica Polonica B, 49(12) 1955 (2018). (https://www.actaphys.uj.edu.pl/fulltext?series=Reg&vol=49&page=1955)

Meeting information:
Friday, Oct 23, 2020 11:00 am | 1 hour 30 minutes | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Meeting number: 120 617 8490
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Brain Space Initiative Talk Series
2020-10-09 11:00 - 12:30 | 30306
Join us, Friday, October 9th, 2020, at 11 AM EDT for an exciting virtual talk by Dr. Peter Bandettini entitled: “New Maps of Activation, Connectivity, and Hierarchy using Ultra High Resolution fMRI”

New Maps of Activation, Connectivity, and Hierarchy using Ultra High Resolution fMRI
Layer fMRI, requiring high field, advanced pulse sequences, and sophisticated processing methods, has emerged in the last decade. The rate of layer fMRI papers published has grown sharply as the delineation of mesoscopic scale functional organization has shown success in providing insight into human brain processing. Layer fMRI promises to move beyond being able to simply identify where and when activation is taking place as inferences made from the activation depth in the cortex will provide detailed directional feedforward and feedback related activity. This new knowledge promises to bridge invasive measures and those typically carried out on humans. In this talk, I will describe the challenges in achieving laminar functional specificity as well as possible approaches to data analysis for both activation studies and resting state connectivity. I will highlight our work demonstrating task-related laminar modulation of primary sensory and motor systems as well as layer-specific activation in dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex with a working memory task. Lastly, I will present recent work demonstrating cortical hierarchy in visual cortex using resting state connectivity laminar profiles.

Biosketch: Dr. Bandettini received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Marquette University in 1989, and his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1994 at the Medical College of Wisconsin where he led the effort to carry out one of the first successful experiments in functional MRI. He completed his post doc at the Massachusetts General Hospital NMR Center in 1996. After spending three years as an Assistant Professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin he was recruited in 1999 to become Director of the Functional MRI Facility at and Chief of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods the National Institutes of Health. Recently, he has become the founding Director of the Center for Multimodal Neuroimaging at the National Institute of Mental Health and has started a Machine Learning group and a Data Sharing group. He also recently completed a 6 year tenure as Editor In Chief of the Journal, NeuroImage. He is the recipient of the 2001 OHBM Wiley Young Investigator Award, and in 2020 was awarded the ISMRM Gold Medal. His research focus over the past 29 years has been on advancing functional MRI in all ways, including novel fMRI methods in acquisition, processing, and paradigm design. He current research focus is high resolution layer fMRI, dynamic connectivity, understanding and mitigating physiologic noise in fMRI time series, and deriving individual specific information using fMRI. He has published over 175 papers and has presented over 390 invited lectures.

Recommended Articles:
· Layer-dependent functional connectivity methods, Huber et al, Progress in Neurobiology (in press) (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2020.101835)
· Higher and deeper: Bringing layer fMRI to association cortex, Finn et al, PsyArXiv (preprint) (https://psyarxiv.com/3xbzw/)
· Sub-millimeter fMRI reveals multiple topographical digit representations that form action maps in human motor cortex, Huber et al. NeuroImage, 2020. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116463)
· Layer-dependent activity in human prefrontal cortex during working memory. (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0487-z)
· High-resolution CBV-fMRI allows mapping of laminar activity and connectivity of cortical input and output in human M1. Neuron 96, 1253-1263, 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.11.005)

Meeting information:
Friday, Oct 9, 2020 11:00 am | 1 hour 30 minutes | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Meeting number: 120 090 0968
Password: [REDACTED]
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BSI Talk series: Simon Eickhoff, PhD
2020-09-25 11:00 - 12:00 | Online
Please join us, September 25th, 2020, at 11 AM EDT for an exciting virtual talk by Dr. Simon Eickhoff entitled: “Leveraging biological knowledge: From Brain Mapping to predictive models”

Title: Leveraging biological knowledge: From Brain Mapping to predictive models

Abstract: The long predominant paradigm in neuroimaging has been to compare (mean) local volume or activity between groups, or to correlate these to behavioral phenotypes. Such approach, however, is intrinsically limited in terms of possible insight into inter-individual differences and application in clinical practice. Recently, the increasing availability of large cohort data and tools for multivariate statistical learning, allowing the prediction of individual cognitive or clinical phenotypes in new subjects, have started a revolution in imaging neuroscience. The transformation of systems neuroscience into a big data discipline poses a lot of new challenges, yet the most critical aspects is the still sub-optimal relationship between the extremely wide feature-space from neuroimaging and the comparably low number of subjects. This, however, is only true when approaching neuroimaging machine-learning in a naïve fashion, i.e., when ignoring the large body of existing work on human brain mapping. The regional segregation of the brain into distinct modules as well as the large-scale, distributed networks provide the fundamental organizational principles of the human brain and hence the basis for cognitive information processing. Importantly, both can now be mapped in a highly robust fashion by integrating information on hundreds or even thousands of individual subjects to provide a priori information. This talk will outline the fundamental principles of topographic organization in the human brain and the robust mapping of functional networks. I will then illustrate, how this knowledge on human brain organization can be leveraged for inference on socio-affective or cognitive traits in previously unseen individual subjects or psychopathology in mental disorders. Providing a bidirectional translation, such application will in turn provide information on the respective brain regions and networks.

Bio: Dr. Simon Eickhoff is a full professor and chair of the Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf and the director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-7, Brain and Behavior) at the Forschungszentrum Jülich. He is furthermore a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Science Institute of Automation. Workig at the interface between neuroanatomy, data-science and brain medicine, the he aims to obtain a more detailed characterization of the organization of the human brain and its inter-individual variability in order to better understand its changes in advanced age as well as neurological and psychiatric disorders. This goal is pursued by the development and application of novel analysis tools and approaches for large-scale, multi-modal analysis of brain structure, function and connectivity as well as by machine-learning for single subject prediction of cognitive and socio-affective traits and ultimately precision medicine.

Recommended Articles:

· Neuroimaging-based prediction of mental traits: Road to utopia or Orwell? (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000497)

· Neurobiological Divergence of the Positive and Negative Schizophrenia Subtypes Identified on a New Factor Structure of Psychopathology Using Non-negative Factorization: An International Machine Learning Study (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2019.08.031)

· Imaging-based parcellations of the human brain (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0071-7)

· Ten simple rules for neuroimaging meta-analysis (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.11.012)

· Predicting personality from network-based resting-state functional connectivity (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-018-1651-z)

Meeting information:

Friday, Sep 25, 2020 11:00 am | 1 hour 30 minutes | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Meeting number: 120 354 1853
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Brain Space Initiative Talk Series: Jessica Turner
2020-09-11 11:00 - 12:30 | Online
Updates from Enigma: Worldwide Collaborative Methods

Jessica Turner, PhD

Associate Professor, Neuroscience, Psychology, TReNDS Center & Georgia State University

The Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) consortium is a worldwide, largely volunteer research collaboration that recently celebrated its 10th year. In that time, it has become a model of large-scale, imaging data re-use for meta- and mega-analysis, leading to numerous results in genetic effects on brain structure, clinical effects on brain structure and function, and methods for analysis of heterogenous structural and functional data. Clinical research domains range from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder to Parkinson’s disease, sleep disorders, HIV and addiction, while methodological developments span gray matter volumes, subcortical shape, sulcal and gyral depth, white matter tract based statistics, and resting state analyses, with recommendations for applying an ENIGMA approach to task-based fMRI are in development. These efforts highlight both the value of combining data analyses, along with the challenges of combining data from studies collected for different reasons in different environments. I will review some of the current efforts underway across the more than 50 working groups within ENIGMA, along with the implications for these kinds of large-scale analyses in the future.
Meeting information

Friday, Sep 11, 2020 11:00 am | 1 hour 30 minutes | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Meeting number: 120 595 8263
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BSI Cognitive Neuroscience Discussion
2020-09-08 09:30 | Online
We invite you to please join us next Tuesday 9/8 at 9:30 am, EDT for an introduction and kick-off discussion for the Brain Space Initiative Cognitive Neuroscience working group. Come find out how to get involved, help set the discussion topics, and ask any questions you have about this new initiative.

The discussion will be held over WebEx at the following link: https://gsumeetings.webex.com/meet/jmalins
The meeting will be recorded for those who can’t attend.

We look forward to meeting you!

BSI Talk Series: Vince Calhoun
2020-08-14 11:00 - 12:00 | Online
Title: Brain Space Initiative: A Social and Technical Resource

Description
Dr. Vince Calhoun, the leader of the Brain Space Initiative, will talk about what is the goal of the BSI and as well as the motivation for some of the existing study group topics by showing some of the ongoing work at TReNDS in his talk entitled: Brain Space Initiative, a social and technical resource.

About Dr. Calhoun
Dr. Calhoun’s work has inspired many young researchers and scientists in the field. He received the 2020 IEEE EMBS Society Technical Achievement Award For his contributions to data-driven processing of multimodal brain imaging and genetic data. He is also the past Chair of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping. Dr. Calhoun has published over 800 journal papers and has over 58000 citations. He has focused his career on the development of data-driven algorithms to map dynamic brain function (including the introduction of group ICA, joint ICA, and whole brain dynamic connectivity (chronnectome) approaches to the field) as well as brain structure, connectivity, and genomics and to study how these networks vary in the healthy and disordered brain. He has also developed and released multiple widely used software toolboxes implementing these algorithms which have been downloaded by over 20,000 unique individuals and have developed multiple centralized and decentralized neuroinformatics tools to enable data capture, management, archiving, analysis, and data sharing, housing over 40,000 datasets across over 800 studies. He is highly collaborative and the TReNDS center he recently founded is focused on leveraging advanced analytic and data science approaches to enable brain imaging biomarkers to be developed and utilized.

Meeting information
Friday, Aug 14, 2020 11:00 am | 1 hour 15 minutes | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Meeting number: 120 212 5286
Password: [REDACTED]
https://gsumeetings.webex.com/gsumeetings/j.php?MTID=m446b7ce4ad6212eedc0da25599ac87a8

Organization for Human Brain Mapping **VIRTUAL** Annual Meeting
2020-06-23 - 2020-07-03 | Online
The 2020 Annual Meeting will take place June 23 – July 3, but now will be offered through an innovative and interactive virtual experience. The Program Committee is already working on the transformation of this meeting, and all the details on participating will be announced soon! Please contact the OHBM Executive Office at info@humanbrainmapping.org if you have any questions.

The OHBM Annual Meeting is the place to learn about the latest international research across modalities in human brain mapping. It is an opportunity for you to have one-on-one discussions with experts in the field and connect with your peers from all over the world. At the educational sessions, junior and senior scientists of various backgrounds teach about the most current and ground-breaking developments in the field, including machine learning techniques, high resolution imaging and most recently also open science methods. The meeting is held every June at stunning locations alternating between North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

OHBM 2020 Brain Hack
2020-06-16 - 2020-06-18 | Online
At the OHBM Brainhack members of the community gather to work collaboratively on common projects.
The event also features a TrainTrack in which tutorials on open science practices are provided.
Brainhacks differ from typical academic conference in that attendees can actively take part in the program and co-learn from each other. Thus, they will be actively trying to create something rather than passively attend. Although many brainhack projects might involve coding, it is not a “requirement and many projects can be done without coding skills.

TReNDS Neuroimaging Competition
2020-04-22 - 2020-06-29 | 30306
In this competition, you will predict multiple assessments plus age from multimodal brain MRI features. You will be working from existing results from other data scientists, doing the important work of validating the utility of multimodal features in a normative population of unaffected subjects. Due to the complexity of the brain and differences between scanners, generalized approaches will be essential to effectively propel multimodal neuroimaging research forward.
The dataset consists of unbiased multimodal neuroimaging features from nearly 12K unaffected subjects and their associated age and assessment values (using 50/50 train/test split to minimize the test set prediction error). The competition will be hosted with Kaggle in a joint collaborative effort by OHBM, the IEEE SPS Data Science Initiative, and the IEEE Challenges and Data Collections Program.
Interested teams and participants will be considered for presenting/publishing their methods in a peer reviewed venue at the discretion of the competition evaluation committee. Special attention will be given to submissions achieving good prediction on the data subset coming from a second scanner, with the goal of encouraging methods unbiased by site/scanner effects.
We hope to stir interest and bring together non-imagers and imagers alike towards this common goal, pushing the envelope to assess the limits of current predictive technologies and gauge the clinical usefulness of neuroimaging features for personalized treatment.
Join the Competition: https://www.kaggle.com/c/trends-assessment-prediction/
Use our hashtag to post your updates on social media: #TReNDSComp2020

Start Date: April 22nd, 2020

Start date: April 21st, 2020

End date (preliminary private leaderboard revealed): June 29th, 2020

Code and leaderboard result verification (winners announced): July 26th, 2020

Prizes

1st Place – $12,000

2nd Place – $8,000

3rd Place – $5,000
Sponsored by

Neuroimaging Series: Eva Dyer
2020-03-13 14:00 - 15:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
“Comparing high-dimensional neural recordings across time, space, and behavior”

With advances in experimental methods in neuroscience, datasets are becoming increasingly high dimensional, both with measurements from larger brain volumes and over longer periods. However, with more data, more neurons, and more points in time, come more problems. In this talk, I will highlight several strategies for distilling complex and high-dimensional neural datasets into more interpretable and simplified low-dimensional formats. Once data are embedded in a low-dimensional space, I will show how their shape and geometry can then be leveraged to align the low-dimensional structures present, even across different datasets that may live in different domains (e.g., neural activity and movement). Alignment thus provides a way to bring many neural datasets together to both understand common computational primitives across brains and learn signatures of disease.

Eva Dyer is an Assistant Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Dr. Dyer works at the intersection of neuroscience and machine learning, developing computational approaches to interpret complex neuroscience datasets, and designing new machine intelligence architectures inspired by the organization of biological brains. Dr. Dyer completed all of her degrees in Electrical & Computer Engineering, obtaining a Ph.D. and M.S. from Rice University, and a B.S. from the University of Miami. She is the recipient of an NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative Award, a Sloan Fellowship in Neuroscience, and is a current Allen Institute for Brain Science Next Generation Leader.

Neuroimaging Series: Mukesh Dhamala
2020-02-28 15:00 - 16:00 | 30306
TReNDS Center Neuroimaging Series

Brain network activity function and dysfunction

Mukesh Dhamala, PhD | Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Georgia State University

Understanding neurocognitive computations both during brain function and dysfunction requires not just identifying the brain regions involved but also determining how brain activity flows among them. In this lecture, I will discuss Granger causality methods for resolving network activity flow and describe our findings of network activity in perceptual decision-making processes and epileptic seizures.

Webex information:

Friday, Feb 28, 2020 3:00 pm | 1 hour | (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Meeting number: 739 244 827

Password: [REDACTED]

https://gsumeetings.webex.com/gsumeetings/j.php?MTID=mb52a9a7a14b884d3c9d9666585188d3f

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Dial 739244827@gsumeetings.webex.com

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Neuroimaging Series: Jeff Malins
2019-12-13 14:00 - 15:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Jeff Malins, Assistant Professor, Psychology, GSU

Neural activation variability as an index of plasticity and learning

An emerging field of cognitive neuroscience contends that quantifying intra-individual variation in brain activity across trials can give important insights into brain dynamics. In this talk, I will present several studies employing task-fMRI to evaluate the relationship between trial-by-trial neural activation variability and reading development in children. After discussing some recent results, I will focus on methodological considerations and future directions for this line of work.

Meeting Information

Friday, Dec 13, 2019 2:00 pm | 1 hour | (UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Meeting number: 733 556 061

Password: [REDACTED]

Meeting link: https://gsumeetings.webex.com/gsumeetings/j.php?MTID=m1edd81f96bff236f81b7cd2506087d12

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Join by video system

Dial 733556061@gsumeetings.webex.com

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Access code: 733 556 061

Tammie Bezinger: Brains & Behavior distinguished lecture series
2019-12-06 12:00 - 13:00 | Petit Science Center, 145 Piedmont Ave SE, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
As part of the B&B distinguished lecture series, Tammie Bezinger, PhD will give a talk entitled “Integrating structural and molecular imaging in dementia imaging”.

Neuroimaging Series: Ying Guo
2019-11-22 14:00 - 15:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Ying Guo, Director, Emory Center for Biomedical Imaging Statistics (CBIS), Emory

Statistical methods for helping improve reliability of brain network analysis

Network-oriented analyses have become increasingly important in neuroimaging studies to advance understanding of neural circuitry among healthy brains and also to investigate disease-related network differences. These analyses often encounter challenges including low signal-to-noise ratio in neuroimaging data, high between-subject heterogeneity in brain networks and network variations across conditions. In this talk, we present new statistical methods to help improve the reliability in brain network analysis. The proposed methods tackle the aforementioned challenges by joint network learning using brain images obtained on the same subjects under different conditions, by multimodality integrative network modeling that incorporates anatomical structure in constructing brain functional networks, and by developing novel statistical tests to more accurately detect network differences between subpopulations.

Webex information: https://gsumeetings.webex.com/gsumeetings/j.php?MTID=m85f5f0d535c2d0e514253f3aa4ec626b

Meeting code: 739 520 259

BrainHack ATL
2019-11-13 - 2019-11-15 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Brainhack ATL is a neuroscience hackathon focused on bringing together students, researchers, non-academic industry professionals, and neuroscientists from a variety of fields and expertise to explore the multiple applications of neuroimaging tools from a cross-disciplinary perspective. BrainHack ATL is part of a larger initiative with this same goal that holds simultaneous events all over the world (Brainhack Global 2019).

Neuroimaging Series: Chethan Pandarinath
2019-11-08 14:00 - 15:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Chethan Pandarinath, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Title:
Uncovering single-trial neural population dynamics with deep learning

Abstract:
Neuroscience is experiencing a revolution in which simultaneous recording of thousands of neurons is revealing population dynamics that are not apparent from single-neuron responses. This structure is typically extracted from data averaged across many trials, but deeper understanding requires studying phenomena detected in single trials, which is challenging due to incomplete sampling of the neural population, trial-to-trial variability, and fluctuations in action potential timing. We introduce latent factor analysis via dynamical systems (LFADS), a deep learning method to infer latent dynamics from single-trial neural spiking data. When applied to a variety of macaque and human motor cortical datasets, LFADS accurately predicts observed behavioral variables, extracts precise firing rate estimates of neural dynamics on single trials, infers perturbations to those dynamics that correlate with behavioral choices, and combines data from non-overlapping record- ing sessions spanning months to improve inference of underlying dynamics.

Paper:
Inferring single-trial neural population dynamics using sequential auto-encoders. Nature Methods, 2018.
doi: http://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-018-0109-9
free access: https://rdcu.be/6Wji

Webex information:
https://gsumeetings.webex.com/gsumeetings/j.php?MTID=m35821f4ba101205ba886945814d45cde

Leah Krubitzer: B&B distinguished lecture series
2019-11-08 12:00 - 13:00 | Petit Science Center, 145 Piedmont Ave SE, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
As part of the brains and behavior distinguished lecture series, Leah Krubitzer, PhD, joins us from UC Davis to give a talk entitled “Combinatorial Creatures: Cortical plasticity within and across lifetimes”.

Sergey Plis: AI and the brain
2019-10-18 14:00 - 15:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
TReNDS Neuroimaging Series
Our very own Sergey Plis will be speaking about AI and the brain.

Information-rich multimodal and multisubject brain imaging datasets facilitate understanding brain function and dysfunction but they are extremely complex. Automatic knowledge discovery from these data could distill their complexity to self-evident information. This talk covers our use and development of deep learning for this task: knowledge discovery in neuroimaging. I will explain why deeper models work better on our data, show how we can use them to discover information about populations of subjects, demonstrate how these models pay attention to structure and function, what they learn about brain dynamics, how they can beat state of the art neuroimaging tools at their game and more.

TReNDS Grand Opening
2019-10-04 08:30 - 12:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Join us for the a “predictive neuroscience” themed Grand Opening as we celebrate the newly founded TReNDS center and the opportunities it will bring the neuroimaging and scientific community-at-large. There will be mingling, an address by our visionary director and founder, Vince Calhoun, and data-blitz talks.

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Neuroimaging group orientation
2019-09-13 14:00 - 15:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Join us for a quick intro to TReNDS and the neuroimaging research community in Atlanta.

Reading Club
2019-09-09 12:00 - 13:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
This Week’s topic: Intro to GANs

TReNDy Talks: Sergey Plis
2019-08-30 14:00 - 15:00 | TReNDS Center, 55 Park Place, Atlanta, GA, 30303, United States
Join us for a talk given by our very own Sergey Plis.
