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. 
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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. 

​​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.

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. ​
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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 learn about recent advances 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.