By Peter Bandettini & the OHBM Neurosalience production team​

In this week’s podcast, Dr Catie Chang walks us through her thought process regarding pulling information out of the fMRI time series. After discussing some of the ongoing issues in fMRI, such as whether or not to use global signal regression to remove noise, she leads us into a commonly overlooked effect in fMRI—that of changes in arousal and vigilance. In particular, this has measurable effects on the resting state fMRI signal. She discusses the perspective that one person’s artifact may be another’s useful signal, depending on the goal of the study. 

​Guest: 
Catie Chang, Ph.D. received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. While in graduate school, she opened up the field of fMRI by publishing a seminal paper using time-frequency analysis of resting state fMRI, showing that it was quite dynamic. Since then, she has been exploring the effect of basic physiological processes, such as cardiac function and respiration on the fMRI signal, and has recently been uncovering unique information regarding the influence that changes in vigilance have on the time series signal. 
---
The Neurosalience production team consists of Rachael Stickland, Kevin Sitek, Katie Moran and Anastasia Brovkin

By Peter Bandettini & the OHBM Neurosalience production team

In this week's episode, Peter talks to directly to MRI scanner vendors. Together, they try to reconcile the importance of fMRI in research contexts with the market pressures of developing clinical applications. As fMRI has virtually no clinical market, does it really influence vendor decisions on pulse sequences and hardware? Could more be done aside from making fMRI more clinically relevant? In this discussion, you’ll hear some fascinating history into the early days of echo planar imaging and high speed imaging, as well as insight into the processes by which products are prioritized. You’ll also find out a possible future of how fMRI may begin to become more clinically useful. 

Guests: 
R. Scott Hinks, Ph.D. is the Retired Chief Scientist from GE Healthcare's MR division. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, where he began his studies of MR Physics and Imaging. For over 34 years Scott has pursued a career in MR research in both industry and academia, specializing in imaging and system physics. He was the principal developer of FSE and has led technical development of EPI for both fMRI and DWI. His work has resulted in numerous publications and over 34 patents. In his most recent role as Chief Scientist for GE Healthcare’s MR division,he is actively engaged in every aspect of MR imaging and works in close collaboration with leading academic researchers worldwide. 

Franz Schmitt, Ph.D. is the retired chief scientist from Siemens’ MR division. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich and has worked for Siemens since 1983, overseeing development of EPI, gradient and RF coils, both 3T and 7T, as well as pTx imaging. He worked on site at the Martinos Center for a few years in the early 2000’s and has been actively engaged in academic research worldwide. 

Ravi Menon, Ph.D. is a Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging and Psychiatry at Western University, where he is also a member of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience and the Graduate Program in Biomedical Engineering and Scientific Director of Western’s Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping (CFMM), Canada’s only ultra-high field MRI facility. He received his Ph.D. in Medicine from the University of Alberta and performed his post doc in the laboratory of Kamil Ugurbil at the University of Minnesota where he helped to pioneer fMRI. 
---
The Neurosalience production team consists of Rachael Stickland, Kevin Sitek, Katie Moran and Anastasia Brovkin

​​By Charlotte Rae, on behalf of the SEA-SIG

The Sustainability and Environment Action (SEA) SIG has formed three new Working Groups, to tackle the environmental impact of the annual meeting, assess environmental implications of neuroimaging research activities, and educate our community on these.

What are the new Working Groups?

In December 2020, we held two open meetings to talk about the priority actions for our new SIG with the OHBM community. We had colleagues attend from across the world, who shared fantastic ideas on how we should make OHBM activities more sustainable.

From these meetings, there was a pretty clear consensus that we needed to tackle three areas: the Annual Meeting, neuroimaging research pipelines, and education. So, we have set up three new Working Groups that will focus on these particular domains.

The Annual Meeting Working Group will assess the environmental impact of the Annual Meeting, investigate sustainable conference models, and make recommendations to the Council for how to create a more sustainable Annual Meeting beyond COVID-19.

The Neuroimaging Research Pipelines Working Group will assess the environmental impact of neuroimaging research pipelines, investigate how we could do our research more sustainably, and create resources and publications to support neuroimagers in greening their research practices.

The Education & Outreach Working Group will collaborate with the other two to educate our community about the impacts our research activities have, including putting on events around the Annual Meeting. It will also seek to collaborate with industry and sister neuroscience societies. In these collaborations and in guiding the SIG's own activities, it will use insights from psychological and neuroscientific work on how humans respond to communications about climate change and environmental issues.

How can I get involved?

We hope that there are lots of OHBM members who are interested in participating in these groups to help us achieve our sustainability objectives!

For example, in the Annual Meeting group, we want to comprehensively assess what the environmental impacts were of recent in-person (e.g. Rome, 2019) and online (2020, 2021) meetings. Looking forward, we hope to then investigate how much our meeting footprint would be reduced if we adopted potential alternative conference models, such as hybrid (with some in-person and some online content), hub-and-spoke (where we have several meeting locations and you travel to your nearest), or moving to a biennial meeting. Many other societies and conferences are considering such options (Figure 1). For the Working Group, we need colleagues who are interested in looking at these options and putting together a report for Council. We are very fortunate that Sepideh Sadaghiani, an experienced member of the Program Committee, has come on board to chair this Working Group.

In the Neuroimaging Research Pipelines Group, we need colleagues who are up for digging down into all the details of a neuroimaging workflow, from hardware and data acquisition to analysis and computing infrastructure. Ideally, we want to quantify the potential environmental implications of all these stages, so we can produce resources for the neuroimaging community that would allow researchers to plug in their pipeline protocol and get a measure of its environmental footprint. Of course the next step is then to provide resources for our community to enable them to go about changing this for the better - establishing what best practice looks like for sustainable neuroimaging. In this group, we will need colleagues from across OHBM disciplines who have experience across all sorts of neuroimaging processing streams. We might also seek to collaborate with external experts such as cloud computing providers.

​The Education & Outreach Working Group will have quite a broad remit around educating our community about the impacts our research activities have, in concert with the other two groups. Here we need colleagues who have experience in (or want to get experience in!) areas such as putting on events around the annual meeting, like symposia and socials; interfacing with industry and sister neuroscience societies; and perhaps even bringing psychology-based knowledge of what works well when communicating about climate change, to make sure we are operating as effectively as possible in the SEA-SIG as a whole.

As well as general group members, we are looking for two individuals who might be interested in Chairing the Neuroimaging Research Pipelines and Education & Outreach groups. 

I’m in! What are the next steps?
​
If you would like to participate in any of the three groups, or would like further information, please do get in touch with us at ohbm.sea.sig@gmail.com. We welcome informal enquiries if you are not sure before you sign up to participate!

For further details on the aims and objectives for each group, see our new website at ohbm-environment.org

If you know a colleague who would be ideal to contribute to one of our groups, please do pass on our details. And you can retweet our Twitter post announcing the groups.

We look forward to sharing updates on the Working Groups’ progress soon!

By Peter Bandettini and the OHBM Neurosalience production team

In this week's podcast, Peter gets a birds-eye view of modeling of messy biologic systems, namely the brain, from Professor Danielle Bassett. They talk about the challenges of measurement accuracy and what scale might be most informative to modeling - and how to make do with what we have. On the clinical side, Danielle discusses network control theory for modulating networks for therapy and limitations in technology for modulation. They consider the limits of network modeling and the search for the equivalent of an idea as powerful as “natural selection” for the brain. In the second part of the podcast Peter and Danielle discuss bias in science and what Danielle is doing to help increase transparency to combat bias.

Danielle Bassett PhD, is currently the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania with a primary appointment in the Department of Bioengineering and a Secondary appointment in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy, Electrical and Systems Engineering, Neurology, and Psychiatry. Dr. Bassett received her B.S. in 2004 in Physics from Penn State University. She received a Ph.D. in physics in 2009 from the University of Cambridge, UK as a Churchill Scholar, and an NIH Health Sciences Scholar. Following a postdoctoral position at UC Santa Barbara, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. In 2013, she joined the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor, and in 2019, was promoted to full professor. She is also founding director of the Penn Network Visualization Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network science and the visual arts. Her primary work is towards developing network models towards deriving principles of brain function. ​
​
The Neurosalience production team consists of Rachael Stickland, Kevin Sitek, Katie Moran and Anastasia Brovkin

​By the Neurosalience production team: Rachael Stickland, Kevin Sitek, Katie Moran and Anastasia Brovkin

OHBM has a new podcast:  Neurosalience!  You can listen to it in your car, while out walking, or just in the ever-present home office. Through Neurosalience, you’ll discover state-of-the-art topics and current controversies in brain mapping. The host for the podcast, Peter Bandettini, has lined up a stellar cast of interviewees ranging from brain scientists to hardware vendors and health professionals.  This includes finding out about publication biases affecting gender and racial minority groups with Dani Bassett, network neuroimaging in neurological populations from Michael Fox, circuit based neuromodulation from Catie Chang and much more. Get all of this insight through your favourite podcast apps, including Spotify, apple podcasts, anchor and Google Podcasts.

We launch with a brief introduction to the podcast, a fireside chat between Peter and Rachael Stickland (one of the OHBM Communication Committee producers for the show). Then the first full episode explores Aperture, the new open-access publishing platform powered by the OHBM. Through discussions with founding members and the Editor in Chief, you’ll learn how Aperture came about and what it hopes to achieve.

​OHBM Neurosalience episode 00: An introduction to the podcast
Peter Bandettini chats with Rachael Stickland, where they set out some of the exciting conversations you’ll hear on OHBM Neurosalience. The name ‘Neurosalience’ highlights the aim of this podcast - to put a spotlight on important developments, discoveries and controversies in the world of human brain mapping. Find out why this podcast was set up, what the main themes and topics will be, and what to look forward to with the first few episodes. 

Speakers:
Peter Bandettini, Ph.D. is Principal Investigator of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods and Director of the Functional MRI Core Facility in NIMH. Recently he has also established the Machine Learning team and the Data Science and Sharing Team as well as the Center for Multimodal Neuroimaging within NIMH to help all intramural investigators with their neuroimaging studies. He has been working on fMRI methods for 30 years. 

Rachael Stickland, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Applied Neuro-Vascular Imaging Lab (ANVIL). Her work focuses on characterizing cerebrovascular function in healthy cohorts and in Multiple Sclerosis, using fMRI with breathing challenges and gas inhalation. 

​Aperture, a new open access publishing platform for neuroimaging research
Peter Bandettini introduces Aperture, a new open access publishing platform for neuroimaging research. Peter is joined by one of the co-founders, Jean-Baptiste Poline, along with  the new Aperture Editor In Chief, Tonya White, and the journal manager, Kay Vanda. Together, they discuss the motive, history, steps for creation, and current status of Aperture. It was created with the strong support of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, and aims to be a peer-reviewed platform for publishing not only papers, but also various other types of research objects that often do not find space in conventional journals, including data, educational tutorials and code. While there is still work to be done to be fully up and running, many insights into this process are shared and discussed. 

Guests: 
Tonya White, MD, PhD is an associate professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam. Her primary research goals are to apply neuroimaging techniques to obtaining a better understanding of genetic and environmental factors associated with typical and atypical brain development in hopes that this will translate into either preventing or decreasing the morbidity of severe psychiatric disorders.

Jean-Baptiste (JB) Poline, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill; the co-Chair of the NeuroHub and Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) at the Montreal Neurological Institute & Hospital (the NEURO); and a Primary Investigator at the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics & Mental Health.

Kay Vanda is the journal manager of OHBM Aperture, working out of the OHBM central offices in Minneapolis, MN. She is a key component of this entire effort as she handles all the organization as well as corresponds with authors, reviewers, and editors.