fMRI Seminar Series

“Individualized and state-specific human brain parcellation in multiple scales”

Speaker: Mehraveh Salehi

Abstract: The goal of human brain mapping has long been to delineate functionally coherent regions in the brain and elucidate the functional role of these regions. Previous work has shown great success in defining functionally coherent regions at multiple scales, by grouping voxels into nodes and further grouping those nodes to form communities or networks in the brain. While the majority of previous work has assumed fixed functional units across individuals and states, we show that the parcellation of the human brain is both individual- and state-dependent. In this talk, I will first present a recently developed individualized and state-specific parcellation technique that utilizes submodular maximization of an exemplar-based utility function. Then, I will cover the predictive models that estimate biological and cognitive characteristics of individuals (including sex and IQ) as well as their brain’s cognitive state (approximated by the task condition as well as the within-condition task performance), solely based on the features extracted from these individualized parcellations.