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Supported by the generosity of the Killam Trusts, The Neuro's Killam Seminar Series invites outstanding guest speakers whose research is of interest to the scientific community at The Neuro and 91社区.

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贬辞蝉迟:听Amir Shmuel

New Frontiers in Imaging the Human Connectome

Abstract:听To this day, critical procedures in neurosurgery and neuromodulation for patients with devastating diseases are guided by knowledge on how the brain is wired that derives largely from animal studies. Such studies rely on the precision of techniques, like tracer injections, that are not feasible in human subjects. Inter-species homologies, particularly between non-human primates and humans, are then used to extrapolate information from the former to the latter. This approach has afforded us an understanding of broad organizational principles in the wiring of the human brain, but crucial details are missing. Recent advances in ex vivo tissue processing and microscopy show great promise for imaging the wiring of the human brain down to the scale of single axonal projections. Much work is needed, however, to turn these breakthroughs into tools in the hands of anatomists. Doing so will allow us to map precisely, for the first time, clinically relevant brain circuits and to design better therapeutic interventions. It will also provide the ground truth that we need to harness recent advances in artificial intelligence and improve noninvasive imaging of the wiring of the brain with diffusion MRI. In this talk, Anastasia will present the center for Large-scale Imaging of Neural Circuits (LINC), a multi-institutional consortium funded by the NIH BRAIN Initiative to lay the technological groundwork for imaging the wiring of the human brain across scales, from the large highways to the small fascicles and down to the single axon level. Anastasia will discuss the image acquisition and analysis advances that will be needed to make this previously unattainable goal a reality.

Anastasia Yendiki

Associate Professor in Radiology, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital

Anastasia Yendiki is Associate Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Associate Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. She is the lead PI of the center for Large-scale Imaging of Neural Circuits (LINC), a multi-institutional consortium funded by the NIH BRAIN Initiative CONNECTS program, with the aim of imaging human and non-human primate brain circuitry across scales. Anastasia received her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she worked on inverse problems in tomographic image reconstruction. She then moved to the Martinos Center, first as a postdoc and then as a faculty member. There she developed TRACULA, the diffusion tractography toolbox in the FreeSurfer software package. She has served as MGH site PI in the Connectomes Related to Human Disease, and spearheaded the IronTract Challenge, an initiative bringing together tractography developers from around the world to compare and optimize the accuracy of their methods using gold standard post mortem data. Her current interests are in obtaining accurate models of white-matter fiber bundles from microscopy techniques, such as anatomic tracing and optical imaging, and developing methods that can take advantage of these post mortem models to infer connectional anatomy from in vivo diffusion MRI.