CAREER: Computational Modeling of Spatial Activation Patterns in fMRI

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

ABSTRACT Functional imaging has been one of the most important measurement tools in the study of brain function. While earlier fMRI-based findings were limited to localization of brain regions strongly modulated by the experimental protocol, the images also contain a wealth of information about the spatial nature of the networks involved in perception and cognition. This project aims to construct novel representations of spatial patterns of activation, to develop methods for extracting such representations from fMRI images and to build visualization tools for interpretation of the detected patterns. Computational tools for modeling spatial patterns of activation will significantly increase the utility of fMRI for investigating the brain function and its organization. The present approach is based on the empirical observation that the spatial patterns of activation are inherently hierarchical. Similar to anatomical hierarchies that represent the structure of the brain as a tree of increasingly simple systems, the functional description of the brain should also be of a hierarchical nature. In this work, functional region hierarchies are constructed to represent functional organization of the brain. In addition to enabling robust and accurate models of functional organization, this new representation reduces the gap between the theories of functional organization of the brain and the functional models extracted from fMRI data. Moreover, a hierarchical structure can be naturally interpreted by a human observer, providing an intuitive and meaningful representation that can be easily integrated with neuroanatomy and other available sources of information. The methodology developed in this project will improve our understanding of spatial connectivity patterns implicitly captured by fMRI. The analysis and visualization tools will enable new ways to investigate the function of the brain. The experimental findings in the collaborative studies will directly produce new hypotheses about functional organization of the relevant systems. The tightly integrated educational and outreach components of the project will directly affect a large number of MIT students and other groups outside MIT by exposing them to open problems and research methods in biomedical imaging and analysis.