The discovery of resting state fMRI ushered in an entirely new subfield of fMRI and a new era in functional imaging that permeates much of what we do today. Today’s guest, Professor Bharat Biswal is credited with the discovery of this signal. In this conversation Professor Biswal recounts the events leading up to and including his discovery of the resting state signal. He and Peter also talk about all things resting state fMRI, including white matter correlations and potential clinical applications. He even turns the tables on Peter, and asks a few questions of his own. This is worth a listen as he weighs in on the challenges, limits, and opportunities of resting state fMRI today.

Today’s Guest:

Bharat Biswal, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is also affiliated with the Department of Radiology in New Jersey Medical School. He received his B.S. in Engineering from Uktal University in 1989, his M.S. from Michigan Technical University in 1991, and his Ph.D. from the Medical College of Wisconsin Department of Biophysics in 1996 under the mentorship of Jim Hyde. While in graduate school, Dr Biswal was the first to report the observation of functional correlation in the resting state signal - in this case between the left and right motor cortex. This first resting state fMRI paper was published in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 1995 and is titled: Functional Connectivity in the motor cortex of resting human brain using echo-planar MRI.

Episode producers:

Ekaterina Dobryakova

Alfie Wearn

Brain Art:

Artist: Paola Galdi

Title: Yarn Brain

Author Description: “I created this figure to debug a piece of code I was writing to map cortical vertices to volumetric voxels and count how many direct neighbours fell within a cortical ribbon mask. My code was definitely wrong, but the figure was cool!”

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