Sponsored by the UCLA Brain Mapping Center Faculty
The focus of these talks is on advancing the use of brain mapping methods in neuroscience with an emphasis on contemporary issues of neuroplasticity, neurodevelopment, and biomarker development in neuropsychiatric disease.
Hosted By: JJ Danny Wang, Ph.D., Neurology, UCLA
 |
Brian B. Avants, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, PENN Image Computing & Science Laboratory, Department of Radiology University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine |
Dr. Avants’ work modules consist of: (1) developing robust, standardized software for computing high-dimensional statistics in medical imaging spaces; (2) using these methods to uncover multivariate relationships between the brain and other factors such as the (social) environment or the presence of neuropathology. In this talk, Dr. Avants will describe the genesis of Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs), touch on a variety of ANT-based applications and preview its newest incarnation, ANTsR (which is ANTs & Eigenanatomy with R as a statistical backend). He will highlight the importance of general but customizable toolkits like ANTs, which seek to standardize processing for large and diverse datasets, by showing how this core may be used in different organs, species and across human populations. Time permitting, Dr. Avants will also discuss recent studies that suggest (1) socioeconomic status (SES) has cortical and functional signatures in childhood; (2) within an economically homogeneous, low-SES population, variation in early experience may be encoded in brain structure. Discussion of these preliminary results will be encouraged.
