Dr. Anastasia Yendiki: Mapping brain wiring with diffusion MRI: Current tools and future prospects скачать в хорошем качестве

Dr. Anastasia Yendiki: Mapping brain wiring with diffusion MRI: Current tools and future prospects

Abstract: Diffusion MRI is the only imaging modality that allows us to reconstruct the wiring of the human brain in vivo. In recent years, initiatives like the human connectome project have led to the availability of large collections of diffusion MRI data with unprecedented quality. However, the tractography methods used for analyzing such data are still prone to errors and ambiguities. In this talk, I will first give an overview of the tools that we have developed for reconstructing white-matter pathways from diffusion MRI, for both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies and across the human lifespan. The common theme of these methods is that they define white-matter bundles in a manner that does not require accurate alignment to a brain template, making them robust to individual variability and to the effects of disease or healthy development and aging. Furthermore, these tools can harness the high quality of connectome-style data to improve the analysis of lower-quality, more routinely acquired scans. Finally, I will discuss our work on post mortem validation of diffusion MRI, and the insights that it provides for how we should be acquiring and analyzing our in vivo data.