In this bonus episode, Peter Bandettini talks to four co-authors from a recent Nature paper on “Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals.” Scott Marek, Brenden Tervo-Clemmens, Damien Fair and Nico Dosenbach discuss their work, demonstrating that to make reproducible associations between MRI measures (both structural and functional) and behavioral measures, upwards of 2000 subjects are required.

The panel discuss the strong reaction across the field to this paper, and how the results fit with the known strong and robust signal from fMRI. They consider why the effect size is essentially three orders of magnitude smaller when trying to pull out differences between subjects. In this insightful, clarifying, and ultimately optimistic conversation about fMRI and the implications of this paper, Peter and his guests go over possible reasons for these extremely small effects, and discuss ways forward.

Over the thirty-nine episodes of this podcast, Peter Bandettini, PhD (twitter: @fmri_today), has guided interesting conversations with brain scientists of all types about the latest developments, controversies, findings, and challenges in the field of brain mapping. Of course, Dr. Bandettini is an impressive and fascinating scientist in his own right, so we on the Neurosalience production team thought it was time to turn things around and shine the spotlight on Peter.

About our "guest": Dr. Bandettini is Chief of the Section on Functional Imaging Methods at the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as Director of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core Facility and Director of the Center for Multimodal Neuroimaging. Peter received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Marquette University and his Ph.D. from the Medical College of Wisconsin, followed by postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts General Hospital Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center and Harvard Medical School, before returning to the Medical College of Wisconsin as assistant professor. In 1999, Dr. Bandettini moved to the National Institute of Mental Health, where he has been ever since.

As of this recording, his research has been cited almost 44,000 times, with 5 of his papers having over 2000 citations, 10 papers with over 1000 citations, and 20 with over 500 citations. Dr. Bandettini has also written the book on functional MRI published by MIT Press, entitled, appropriately, “fMRI”.

Peter has been highly involved in the Organization for Human Brain Mapping since essentially the beginning, including serving as President, Program Chair, and scientific advisory board member. Peter is also a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, where he was awarded the ISMRM Gold Medal in 2020, and he was previously the editor-in-chief of the journal NeuroImage, along with serving as associate editor for that journal and many others.

Through all of this, Dr. Bandettini has advised numerous grad students and postdocs, some of whom you’ll hear about in today’s episode. We’ll hear about Peter’s approach to mentorship, to science in general, and to science communication, and to much, much more.

About our guest host: Kevin Sitek, PhD, is a research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Kevin joined the OHBM Communications Committee in 2020 and has worked with the Neurosalience production team since the podcast started in early 2021. You can find Kevin on twitter at @krsitek.

Eric Wong is Professor and Associate Director for Imaging Hardware at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1991 from the Medical College of Wisconsin where he was the key person in starting fMRI at the Medical College of Wisconsin. 

In this podcast, Eric and Peter start by revisiting when they first met and the flurry of excitement and activity when fMRI was just starting - at the time when they were both graduate students. They talk about Eric’s work in MRI hardware, perfusion imaging, and MRI physics, and then transition into his current work in computational neuroscience where he is spending most of his time and attention. Eric also shares some thoughts on a better approach to understanding human intelligence and why it may not be as complicated as it seems.

Randy McIntosh, Ph.D. has been a scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre at the University of Toronto since 1994 and, since the start of 2022, is the new Director of the Simon Fraser University Institute for Neuroscience and Neurotechnology in Burnaby British Columbia - just outside of Vancouver.

Randy obtained his PhD in 1992 from the University of Texas at Austin in Psychology and Neuroscience and did a postdoc at the NIH with Barry Horwitz until 1994. His group uses neuroimaging and computational modeling to understand the dynamics of healthy brains as well as those from many different clinical populations, lending insight and providing potential biomarkers through comparing his dynamic brain models with empirical data. He is also part an international consortium called the TheVirtualBrain which is an open science neuroinformatics platform for modeling the brain. Along with the exciting news of Randy’s new position, he has also just published a two part book called A Complex Journey - which is a sci-fi novel that delves into the complexity of the brain.

Discussion:

In this discussion we talk about his research in modeling brain dynamics, and specifically about this ambitious yet increasingly impactful project involving The Virtual Brain. We also delve into the different kinds of brain modeling approaches and what these different models provide. Lastly we talk about his new position as well as his new institute’s unique goals of more effectively translating neuroscience to all inclusive clinical care for individuals.

Today we are discussing the general question of how neuroimaging (and mostly fMRI) fit into the landscape of neuroscience research approaches. More specifically we discuss the question of what, over the years, has neuroimaging taught us about the brain? In this fascinating discussion, we work through many related topics and get a solid sense of Dr. Passingham’s perspectives on these - including his views on mentoring, a critique or refinement of David Marr’s three criteria for understanding the brain, the need to put forth falsifiable hypotheses, his enthusiasm for for Optically Pumped Magnetometers, and the need for an array of tools and approaches - not just fMRI -  for understanding the brain.

Guest:

Dick Passingham, Ph.D. is currently Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and is also an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. In addition, he is Emeritus Honorary Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London.  His career has been spent at these two institutions, and from 1991–1995 also at the MRC Cyclotron Unit at the Hammersmith Hospital London. He has published over 200 research papers and eight books. Lastly, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2009 in recognition of his achievements.

In this episode Dr Peter Bandettini and co-host Dr Brendan Ritchie interview Dr Grace Lindsay. They find out about her new book 'Models of the mind' and about the process of writing a book. In doing so, they consider different types of brain models, from simply descriptive to more mechanistic, from too simple to overfitted. They describe the challenge in neuroscience of network modelling - the many unknowns and limited data and how output of the model may help inform its accuracy. They then discuss specific models, such as Deep Neural Networks, and how this type of modelling may progress in the future. Last, Lindsay gives some thoughts about the future hopes, philosophies, and strategies of modelling - how doing it well is both an art and a science.

In this episode, we discuss what was important to Pedro early in his career. He describes his first forays into clinical use of EEG back in the 70s and then we go on to discuss some of his highly creative work in deeply interpreting EEG signals today. Later we discuss his current visiting position in Chengdu, China and a growing EEG database as well as his international consortium. We touch briefly on the current state of medical care in Cuba as well as how Cuba has dealt with COVID-19. This episode was recorded on October 22nd 2021. 

Guest: 

Pedro Valdes-Sosa is the General Vice-Director for Research of the Cuban Neurosciences Center, which he co-founded in 1990. He studied medicine at the University of Havana, and graduated in 1972. He also studied Mathematics in 1973. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1978. In 1979 he did a PostDoc on "Neurometrics and Computational Techniques" and "Biophysical Modeling of brain electrical activity" with Prof. E. Roy John at the Brain Research Lab of New York University. He is a full member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, and the Latin American Academy of Sciences, associate member of the International Center for Theoretical Physics.

Pedro is known not only for his innovation and rigor in EEG analysis but also for his highly collaborative work and passion to improve science development, communication and dissemination in less developed countries. He’s currently flying back and forth between Havana and Chengdu, China where he is developing pooled databases for quantitative EEG.

Peter talks to Dr. Lucina Uddin about the constant struggle shared by all scientists in the field of neuroimaging to find the right paradigms, acquisition tools, and analysis approaches to add insight into fundamentals of brain organization and how it relates to behavior. They talk about cognitive flexibility, Autism, the salience network, and the need for an ontology of network nomenclature so that the field can better communicate, share, and understand findings. They also discuss the NIH’s goal of having a research domain criteria (RDoC) to organize and understand disorders in a more brain data-driven manner. Lastly, they discuss her perspective on advancing diversity in science. It was a fun conversation that put in perspective the many challenges facing functional brain imaging research.

For more info on the Neurosalience podcast and the guests, visit ohbmbrainmappingblog.com

Functional MRI is a profoundly successful and powerful technique that so many of us use. It’s still developing and adding to our insight about the human brain. While MRI was developed in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, it would be another decade before it was realized that MRI could be used to detect and map, non-invasively, human brain activation. My guests today, Ken Kwong, Bob Turner, and Ravi Menon were the first who showed this capability. Ken’s successful experiment in early May of 1991 was arguably the first. Ravi, who was the key player in the Minnesota group, had produced solid fMRI results by the summer of 1991, and I had my first successful experiment in Sept of 1991. Bob Turner was a key player in his physiologic manipulation experiments in Cats. He collaborated with Ken, and also showed results of his own at 4T shortly after as well. We were all there at the Society for Magnetic Resonance Imaging Meeting in San Francisco in August of 1991 when Tom Brady (who headed MGH NMR Center at the time), first showed in his plenary lecture, the crude but stunning jaw dropping brain activation movies. The moment I saw that, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. We have them all here to reflect on those heady days, what led up to their findings, and the bright future of fMRI.

Guests:

Ken Kwong has been conducting MRI research at the Mass General Hospital since the late 80’s when he pioneered diffusion imaging, as well as perfusion imaging approaches. He’s currently associate professor at the MGH Martinos Center.

Robert Turner trained with inventor of Echo Planar Imaging, Peter Mansfield, among others, and while working at the NIH, performed those first critical experiments, demonstrating BOLD contrast as well as obtaining some of the first results in humans at 4T using his home built gradient coil. One of Bob’s major contributions to the field was his early work in gradient coil design - which remains fundamental to what we do. From 2006 to 2014 he was the Director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and is currently retired and living in Cambridge, England.

Ravi Menon was a post doc at Minnesota and a driving force in the effort to produce functional images using a highly challenging non-EPI approach at 4T. He has been a steady contributor to fMRI methods ever since and is currently a Robarts Scientist and Canada Research Chair in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Co-Scientific Director of BrainsCAN which is Canada First Research Excellence Fund, Scientific Director, Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping, and Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging & Psychiatry at The University of Western Ontario

Maurizio Corbetta is Full Professor and Chair of Neurology in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also the founding director of the new Padua Neuroscience Center, a highly interdisciplinary research programme centered on the idea of brain networks in health and society.

After receiving is M.D. from the University of Pavia in Italy, he carried out a residency in Neurology at the University of Verona. In 1990 he moved to US, carting out a fellowship in NeuroImaging at Barnes Hospital at Wash U in St. Louis. While in St. Louis, he worked his way up to being the Norman J. Strupp Professor of Neurology, and Professor of Radiology, Anatomy, Neurobiology Bioengineering and Neuroscience at Wash University, as well as Director of Stroke and Brain Injury Rehabilitation at the Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis. He moved back to Italy, to teh University of Padua, in 2016.

Prof. Corbetta has pioneered experiments on the neural mechanisms of human attention using Positron Emission Tomography (PET). He has discovered two brain networks dedicated to attention control, the dorsal and ventral attention networks, and developed a brain model of attention. His clinical work has focused on the physiological correlates of focal injury. He has developed a pathogenetic model of the syndrome of hemispatial neglect.

He is currently developing novel methods for studying the functional organization of the brain using functional connectivity MRI, magneto-encephalography (MEG), and electro-corticography (EcoG). He is also working on the effects of focal injuries on the network organization of brain systems with an eye to neuromodulation. He is known for the high level of rigor and deep insight of his research, and has over 16 papers with over 1000 citations.

Discussion

In our conversation, we discuss some of the key people that influenced him, the incredible team of people at Washington University, as well as some of his early work. We also discuss his perspective on the utility and information in resting state fMRI. He’s senior author of one of the most provocative and compelling explanations for resting state activity that I’ve seen: titled The secret life of predictive brains: what’s spontaneous activity for? Pezzulo et al TICS 2021. We go on from there to discuss his perspective of the substantial importance and profound potential of systems level neuroimaging to not only basic neuroscience but also to clinical practice. Toward the end of our discussion, he highlights how diagnosis and treatment of stroke with neuromodulation can leverage current state of the art neuroimaging techniques.