Events Calendar

Surface-based Methods for Analyzing Brain Structure and Connectivity

Speaker: Boris Gutman, Ph.D., Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California

Talk Title: Surface-based Methods for Analyzing Brain Structure and Connectivity

Series: Medical Imaging Seminar Series

Abstract: In this talk I will describe several shape centric methods for analyzing brain MR image data. The first part will focus on surface-based analysis of structural MRI. I will suggest some parametric registration techniques, with particular focus on adapting traditional image registration algorithms to the spherical domain. Building on this, an alternative shape space will be proposed, extending the Ebin metric on the 2 sphere to a Riemannian product metric for simple closed surfaces.

The second part of the talk will offer a method to combine surface representations and diffusion MRI based connectivity analysis. We will propose a generative model of structural connectivity based on the Poisson point process. Treating each tractography fiber model as a point observation in the continuous brain product space, we estimate the spatially distributed Poisson parameter to represent cortical connectivity. We can then adapt traditional spatial domain tasks such as registration and segmentation based on this continuous connectivity representation. Example adaptations will be proposed.

Example applications to the study of genetics and disease will be shown throughout, with some special focus on Partial Least Squares modeling as an alternative to the traditional genome wide association study (GWAS).


Biography: Boris Gutman is a Post-doctoral Scholar at the Imaging Genetics Center within the Stevens Institute for Neuroimaging and Informatics at the University of Southern California. His current research interests include biomedical shape analysis, brain connectivity and imaging genetics, with the goal of enabling new discoveries of genetic associations and disease effects in the human brain.


Host: Professor Richard Leahy

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

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Talyia White