Events Calendar

Multimodal Neuroimaging, Analysis, and Modeling in Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Speaker: Dr. John D. Van Horn, Department of Neurology/Keck School of Medicine of USC

Talk Title: Multimodal Neuroimaging, Analysis, and Modeling in Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Abstract: The increasing interest in combining neuroimaging modalities to study brain structure, function and circuitry has brought about an appreciable challenge to image processing experts from the standpoint of inferring clinically valuable information based on enormous amounts of high-dimensionality imaging data. This challenge is particularly serious when attempting to quantify brain changes due to traumatic brain injury (TBI), a condition whose heterogeneity precludes the use of standard image processing algorithms for tissue segmentation, brain morphometry, population atlasing and neuroinformatics. Current efforts by translational researchers to formulate patient-tailored rehabilitation protocols for TBI must be complemented by critical input from neuroinformaticians, signal processing, and image analysis experts to develop next-generation image analysis methods for brain trauma. Because TBI-related deficits are predicated upon individual brain circuitry profiles, such methods must be robust enough to accommodate the heterogeneity and wide variety of structural deformation and degeneration patterns encountered in this condition. In this presentation, I will outline our recent computational and analytic efforts toward developing state-of-the-art neuroimaging analysis protocols and informatics approaches for characterizing brain injury longitudinally at the structural, functional, and connectomic levels. To improve on existing abilities to capture injury-related changes to the brain, we have combined multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and electroencephalography (EEG) with network theory, geometric modeling and inverse localization methods in the context of a sophisticated neuroimaging analysis approach. This has allowed us to longitudinally map TBI location, extent, and change over time. Further progress in this field depends critically upon input from the engineering and computer science communities to develop algorithms for segmentation, morphometry and atlasing which can handle the large structural brain deformations encountered in neurotrauma. Such contributions could result in substantial translational benefit to neurosurgeons, neurologists and psychiatrists who are interested in using neuroimaging to monitor brain injury evolution and for clinical intervention. Thus, despite substantial progress on quantifying TBI-related brain changes, considerable input is still needed from image processing, visualization and informatics experts to address the difficulties of this epidemiologically prominent field.

Biography: Dr. Van Horn is a recent addition to the USC faculty, having held prior positions at the National Institutes of Health, Dartmouth College, and UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from Department of Psychology at the University of London and hold a master's degree in engineering from the University of Maryland College Park. He explores the neurophysiology of the human brain using in vivo neuroimaging techniques, e.g. functional MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, and its relations to other biological systems. Areas of interest in neuroimaging include multimodal MRI, connectomics, characterizing the effects of neurotrauma, visuo-spatial task performance and motor learning. He has also examined the use of pharmacological manipulations as probes of cognitive and physiological networks during fMRI. He is also known for his contributions to neuroinformatics: mathematical modeling, experimental design, statistical, quantitative methods, data visualization, and the sociological and technical issues of neuroscientific data sharing, as well as neuroimaging data base and data mining. Presently, Dr. Van Horn is tenured faculty in the Department of Neurology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a principle member of the Institute for Neuroimaging and Informatics (INI).

Host: Dr. Sandeep Gupta, sandeep@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher