Season 3 of Neurosalience has begun!
By Alfie Wearn
(new) Podcast team lead
The OHBM podcast is back with a brand-new season of content.
If you don’t already know, Neurosalience is a bi-weekly podcast featuring discussions with the people of the OHBM community—the humans behind the brain-mapping, if you will. Hosted by Peter Bandettini, the podcast features conversations with leading researchers in the field, developers of your favorite analysis packages, and other key figures in the world of neuroimaging. The podcast is aimed at anyone interested in neuroimaging, from established faculty to the very earliest of early-career researchers. New episodes are released every other Wednesday — do come and join us!
Here’s a breakdown of the first few episodes released so far:
Season 3 Episode 1: A new season of Neurosalience
Watch / Listen
Season 3 introduces a few changes from previous seasons, the main one being that now we have video episodes available on our YouTube channel! If you’d rather just listen to the episodes as before, nothing will change for those listening on other platforms (Anchor, Spotify, etc.).
Taking advantage of this video format, each episode will now also feature a piece of brain-art from our OHBM art community. If you submitted anything to the OHBM 2022 brain art competition, you may see your art appearing soon, stay tuned!
For more details on changes this season, take a look at the first episode of Season 3 now, in which I (Alfie) chat with Peter about the podcast and the season ahead.
Season 3 Episode 2: Multi-echo EPI: An under-utilised tool for fMRI
Watch / Listen
In this episode, Peter and guests Prantik Kundu and Charles Lynch discuss one very cool and very useful fMRI acquisition strategy called multi-echo EPI (echo-planar imaging). While it’s been around for over 20 years, only a fraction of papers reporting fMRI results have used this acquisition method. It can help quite a bit towards increasing sensitivity, mitigating signal dropout and motion artifacts, and stabilizing the time series to allow for tracking of very slow changes. Recent papers have come out showing that it significantly helps increase sensitivity and mitigate artifacts. In fact, several prominent leaders in the field are embracing it as they are convinced it's essential for increasing the reproducibility and, ultimately, the clinical utility of fMRI.
In this episode, Peter, Prantik and Charles cover what multi-echo EPI can and can’t do. They also discuss the options in pulse sequence parameters, what vendors offer, fMRI processing techniques, and available processing packages designed to work with multi-echo data.
Guests:
- Charles Lynch, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral associate in Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who received his Ph.D. in 2018 from Georgetown University in Washington DC and has written several impactful papers convincingly describing the benefits of multi-echo EPI for fMRI.
- Prantik Kundu, Ph.D. is a pioneer in multi-echo EPI processing and developed the powerful approach called ME-ICA to process multi-echo EPI data. In 2014, Prantik received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He was a student of both Ed Bullmore and Peter Bandettini, working in the NIH-Cambridge graduate program. He was assistant professor at Mount Sinai in New York before becoming a lead scientist at Hyperfine (the company that came out with the ultra-low field portable scanner). Recently, he has started in the position of Chief Technology Officer at Ceretype Neuromedicine, a company based in Boston that is pioneering precision neuropsychiatry towards increasing the clinical relevance of functional brain imaging.
Season 3 Episode 3: OHBM2022 Live: The way forward to better BWAS studies
Watch / Listen
This week, we have something a little different: a live podcast recorded at the OHBM 2022 Annual Meeting featuring a continuation of a discussion of the recent paper "Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals" by Scott Marek et al. (2022). This paper set the stage for some great discussions about what brain-wide association studies (BWAS) means for the field and its broader implications for brain research (see Season 2 Episode 21 for a discussion with the authors). For the live podcast, Peter is joined by four leaders in the field whose research is very related and hinges on the ideas around the Marek et al. paper.
Guests:
- Avram Holmes, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology and of Psychiatry at Yale University.
- Caterina Gratton, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Florida State University.
- Paul Thompson, Ph.D. is a Professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Radiology, Psychiatry, and Engineering and Associate Director of the University of Southern California Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute.
- Monica Rosenberg, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago.
If you have guest or topic suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Please email the OHBM Communications Committee (ohbm.comcom@gmail.com) or Peter directly (bandettp@mail.nih.gov).