I have argued in the past that fMRI studies are limited by ‘oversimplified assumptions made during pre-processing’  That, by modelling all human brains from the same broad topological structure (enforcing a constant number of functionally specialised regions, organised in a consistent pattern across all brains) we are not capturing true inter-subject variability in cortical organisation.… Continue reading Are variations in Functional Connectivity strength driven by variations in spatial topography?

Due to the immense complexity of the brain’s neural network, research into the brain is performed at a hierarchy of scales. One common holistic approach is to model the brain, at a coarse scale, as consisting of a relatively small number of functionally specialised regions, connected in a network, known as the connectome. Recent advances… Continue reading The Cortical Explorer – A Web-based user-interface for the exploration of the human cerebral cortex

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has been under intense scrutiny this summer following concerns over the replicability, and  claims that up to  40, 000 studies may be invalidated by poor statistics . Unfortunately, despite being a powerful resource for non-invasive exploration of brain function, fMRI signals are an indirect measure of brain activity, that suffer from many… Continue reading Forget weak statistics, fMRI studies suffer from oversimplified assumptions made during pre-processing

  I recently write a blog post for Lab news describing my take on the HCP multimodal cortical parcellation. You can find it here    

***note the slides that accompanied the Imperial Festival Presentation of this theme***  are attached below ImperialFestivalprepFINAL With the sudden emergence of real-world artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as Google DeepMind’s #alphago, decisively beating human Go champion, Lee Sedol[1]; Samsung releasing an AI for breast cancer detection [2]; and Microsoft announcing a deep learning application for the… Continue reading Clever Robots: Understanding Artificial Intelligence in the context of our own minds

The WU-Minn Human Connectome Project has provided an immensely powerful resource of 1000 adult subjects functional and structural imaging data, all projected to the surface. This resource has already begun to generate high impact publications and huge leap forwards in understand macroscale brain structure and its influences on human behaviour [1][2]. Nevertheless the data sets… Continue reading ***Unofficial*** Guide to the HCP surface file formats