Rising Star in Bio-Imaging in Quebec lecture
By presenting the annual Rising Star in Bio-Imaging in Quebec Award, QBIN highlights the work of an emerging researcher in the field of bio-imaging.
The Connected Brain - Bratislav Misic, McGill University
The complex network spanned by millions of axons and synaptic contacts acts as a conduit for both healthy brain function and for dysfunction. Collective signaling and communication among populations of neurons supports flexible behaviour and cognitive operations. Perturbations, such as stimulation-induced dynamic activity or the accumulation of pathogenic proteins, often spread from their source location via axonal projections. Here I will focus on how two fundamental types of dynamics - electrical signaling and molecular transport - can be modeled in brain networks.
Bratislav Misic
Bratislav Misic is a mathematician with expertise in neuroimaging and network science. He trained with Randy McIntosh (PhD, University of Toronto) and Olaf Sporns (post-doc, Indiana University). He joined McGill University in 2016, where he leads the Network Neuroscience Lab (https://netneurolab.github.io/). His group studies how the links and interactions among brain areas support cognitive operations, complex behaviour and global dynamics.
Learn more about Bratislav Misic in this interview on the QBIN Blog!
William Feindel Lecture
The William Feindel Lecture honors a scientist who has made significant contributions to the field of imaging.
ENIGMA, Big Data & the Human Brain: Imaging & Genomics of Brain Diseases in 100,000 Individuals from 45 Countries - Paul Thompson, University of Southern California
Since 2009, the ENIGMA Consortium has published the largest genetic studies of the human brain, and the largest neuroimaging studies of 9 brain disorders, pooling data from 45 countries. Building on large-scale genetic studies yielding over 200 robustly replicated genetic loci associated with brain metrics (Grasby et al., Science 2020), ENIGMA conducted the largest neuroimaging studies to date in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADHD, ASD, epilepsy, and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, revealing factors that influence their onset, severity, and prognosis. We describe how consensus protocols evolved for MRI, DTI, resting state fMRI, and EEG, as well as clinical, genomic and epigenetic data, leading to vast worldwide studies of over 22 disorders and conditions. Innovations in data analysis include the use of generative adversarial networks, algorithmic fairness, and information theory to help pool data from many sites, and distributed computation and cooperative machine learning to help discover patterns in distributed datasets. We also describe new approaches to harmonize data for multi-site computations, and how the assumptions of the approaches affect the results. Finally, we cover how deep learning and data fusion methods may help to identify patterns in multimodal brain data distributed in biobanks across the world.
ENIGMA is funded by public and private agencies worldwide, listed here: http://enigma.ini.usc.edu/about-2/funding/
Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson, Ph.D., directs the ENIGMA Center for Worldwide Medicine, Imaging & Genomics – a U.S. National Center of Excellence for “Big Data” analysis in biomedical research. He also co-leads AI4AD (the Artificial Intelligence for Alzheimer’s Disease Initiative) – a new $18M USD NIH initiative to apply deep learning to discover and understand drug targets based on whole genome sequence data and large-scale biobanks. Since 2009, Dr Thompson has led the ENIGMA consortium (http://enigma.ini.usc.edu), a worldwide medical network of 1,000 institutions across 45 countries studying the major diseases of the brain, with MRI, diffusion MRI, resting state fMRI, EEG and genomics. ENIGMA published the largest neuroimaging studies of 9 major brain disorders and conditions – including PTSD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, ADHD, autism, and OCD. ENIGMA leads international studies of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, anorexia, substance use, and anxiety disorders. In ENIGMA’s papers in Science and Nature, 340 institutions pooled DNA and MRI data from over 50,000 people to identify over 200 genomic loci that influence the rates of brain development, aging, and disease risk, using massively-parallel distributed “big data” computing. ENIGMA analyzes factors that affect the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and childhood brain disorders. Dr. Thompson’s group created the first MRI maps of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia spreading in the living brain, and a method to detect brain growth in children (published in Nature). Thompson directs the Imaging Genetics Center and is Associate Director of USC’s Stevens Institute for Neuroimaging and Informatics. At USC, he is a Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, Radiology, Pediatrics, Engineering, and Ophthalmology. Dr. Thompson obtained his M.A. in Mathematics and Greek & Latin Languages from Oxford University, England, and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCLA. Dr. Thompson’s 1,600 published research papers combine the talents of researchers in mathematics, neuroimaging, and clinical neurology (see http://enigma.ini.usc.edu); in 2020, he was the 198th most cited scientist worldwide: http://www.webometrics.info/en/hlargerthan100
Please note: You will have access to the full schedule and the Zoom links after you register for the event
