Coupling of Structure-Function in the Human Brain

06.12.2019 11:15 – 12:15

RESEARCH CENTER FOR STATISTICS SEMINAR / ABSTRACT

“State-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides unprecedented opportunities to study brain structure (anatomy) and function (physiology). Based on such data, graph representations can be built where nodes are associated to brain regions and edge weights to strengths of structural or functional connections. In particular, structural graphs capture major neural pathways in white matter, while functional graphs map out statistical interdependencies between pairs of regional activity traces. Network analysis of these graphs has revealed emergent system-level properties of brain structure or function, such as efficiency of communication and modular organization.

In this talk, graph signal processing (GSP) will be presented as a novel framework to integrate brain structure, contained in the structural graph, with brain function, characterized by activity traces that can be considered as time-dependent graph signals. Such a perspective allows to define novel meaningful graph-filtering operations of brain activity that take into account smoothness of signals on the anatomical backbone. For instance, we will show how activity can be analyzed in terms of being aligned versus liberal with respect to brain structure, or how additional prior information about cognitive systems can be incorporated. The well-known Fourier phase randomization method to generate surrogate data can also be adapted to this new setting. Finally, recent work will highlight how the spatial resolution of this type of analyses can be increased to the voxel level, representing a few hundredth thousands of nodes.”

Lieu

Bâtiment: Uni Mail

Bd du Pont-d'Arve 40
1205 Geneva

Room: M 5220, 5th floor

entrée libre