Neuroimaging and Big Data in Connectomics: Advances in Understanding the Wiring of the Brain

MBB 980V Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Constructing a map of the connections between the 86 billion neurons in the human brain has been a goal of neuroscience since the field originated. Connectomics research, which aims to understand how the brain is wired together into this map, has shown the human brain to be a complex network with the same properties that other complex networks exhibit. Much like our social networks, the world wide web, and our travel systems, the brain demonstrates organization along similar principles as these networks and can be studied using techniques adapted from network science. Using this "network neuroscience" approach has shown that the brain's gray matter is organized into a functional connectome comprised of modules called brain networks that orchestrate their functions to support our everyday activities. More recently, advances in another MRI technique called diffusion MRI have made it possible to study the organization of the brain’s white matter "information highways", or structural connectome, that transmit information from brain region-to-brain region, brain network-to-brain network. MRI-based connectomics is a rapidly growing field, with new methods and applications evolving at an incredibly fast pace and there are now numerous large-scale neuroimaging initiatives across the world that are aimed at mapping the human brain connectome. These studies aim to map the human brain connectome across the lifespan, from in utero to the oldest old, and in brain disorders such as mental illnesses, developmental disorders, neurological disorders and other health conditions. The goal of this class is to understand how MRI can be used to study the living human brain connectome and the latest advances these approaches have revealed in our understanding of the wiring of the brain. We will also dive into some of the large-scale neuroimaging datasets to see how we can leverage these open access resources for connectomics research. This course is designed for students in the MBB programs who are interested in learning about how we study brain connectivity and how the brain is organized, including those who are interested in neuroscience applications and brain disorders and those interested in bioinformatics/computer science/statistics/physics applications in neuroimaging. To unlock the “black box” nature of the sophisticated MRI methods used for connectomics research, we will learn the basics of the workhorse MRI connectomics methods, functional and diffusion MRI, from a conceptual perspective. We will learn how each of these techniques is used for connectomics studies and some key methodological and interpretational issues for each. Then we will focus on the brain’s connectome. We will discuss brain organization, including how to construct a brain graph as the mathematical embodiment of the brain’s connectome and how to evaluate the brain’s network properties using graph theory and other approaches, the brain networks that have been reported in the literature, and the links between structural and functional connectomes. We will do a survey of widely used open access tools for connectivity and connectome analyses, and open access connectome datasets with sample sizes of hundreds up to a hundred thousand, including the Human Connectome Lifespan and Disease Connectome studies, the ABCD study, and the UK Biobank. These datasets will also be used as hypothetical data sources for your final research projects. Last, we will discuss ethical, computational, and statistical issues when working with these large open access datasets.