Assessing Accuracy and Significance of Structural and Functional Brain Images

SPEAKER: Dimitrios Pantazis, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Signal and Image Processing InstituteABSTRACT: Recent developments in instrumentation, coupled with new data analysis tools, have led to unique ways of noninvasively exploring the human brain. For example, whole head Magnetoencephalography (MEG) arrays provide dynamic images of human brain function at a millisecond scale; Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) methods allow access to structural and diffusion brain images, as well as functional maps of hemodynamic response. I will discuss ways of identifying experimental effects in dynamic images of MEG brain activation through the use of random field theory and permutation statistical tests. I will then extend these tests to spatial-spectral activation maps, morphological tests of brain structures, and tumor detection in positron emission tomography. Efficient methods to analyze MEG data through the use of custom analysis of covariance models will be presented and applied in a human visual attention study. I will conclude with an evaluation of manual and automatic human cortex registration methods.BIO: Dimitrios Pantazis is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, and the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and House Ear Institute in Los Angeles through the Biomedical Imaging Sciences Initiative in USC. He is a member of the Biomedical Imaging Research Lab lead by Prof. Richard M. Leahy, and has broad research interests in modeling and statistical analysis of anatomical and functional brain signals. He received a diploma in EE from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki - Greece in 1996, and a M.S and Ph.D. in EE from the University of Southern California in 2003 and 2006 respectively. More information on his research can be found at http://neuroimage.usc.edu/pantazisHOST: Richard Leahy, leahy@sipi.usc.edu

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

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher