Dear Freesurfistas - This new course, offered at the Martinos Center right before the OHBM meeting, may be of interest to some of you. There are some open spots left.

For info on how to register and a tentative schedule, see the web page at the end of the announcement.

a.y

---

STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL BRAIN CONNECTIVITY AS REVEALED BY MRI

Dates: June 3-7, 2013 Themes:   Resting State Functional Connectivity and DTI/DSI/Tractography Location: Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging of the Massachusetts General Hospital; Boston/Charlestown Massachusetts Program Director: Robert L. Savoy

In December 2012 the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging introduced a new, 5-day program on functional and structural connectivity using MRI.  The next edition of this program will be held June 3-7 (two weeks prior to the Organization for Human Brain Mapping annual meeting).  There is likely to be an additional program in 2013, to be held near the end of October or early November, 2013.

Issues associated with connectivity in the human brain are of increasing importance, as reflected in the large number of abstracts, research articles, and even entire journals devoted to this area, as well as the increased emphasis on lesions within the white matter as being a source of many neuro-psychiatric disorders.  MRI has proven to be a valuable tool for examining connectivity both in terms of the coordinated activities of neural networks (using BOLD-based fMRI data collected during rest and during tasks) and also in terms of the structural anatomy of white matter pathways of the brain (using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI), and tractography programs to analyze and visualize the resulting data).  Participants will learn about the technical challenges in acquisition, data processing and visualization of brain networks via the data from fMRI during the so-called resting state, but also available during experimenter-initiated cognitive tasks.  Participants will also receive a firm grounding in the power and limitations associated with using diffusion-sensitive MRI to detect and organize the anatomical structure of white matter tracts in the living human brain.

The primary goal of this program is to give researchers and clinicians a good start for their investigations using these tools.  In that sense, it serves a purpose analogous to that of the Functional MRI Visiting Fellowship Program (fMRIVFP) also offered at the Martinos Center, except that the domain will be structural and functional connectivity of myelinated fiber tracts within the living human brain.  The active component of the program will be the use of software tools to promote quality assurance in the data, detect outliers and other problematic attributes of the data, optimize data acquisition, and flexibly visualize the data in the service of asking and answering specific questions.  Participants will be expected (though not required) to bring a suitable laptop computer for engaging in the hands-on exercises of the program.  There will also be a section on the Connectome MRI Machine that uses exceptionally strong gradients to enhance data acquisition of strutural and functional images.

The core faculty is drawn from the staff of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center (of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and affiliated faculty from Harvard University, McLean Hospital and other local institutions.  Guest lecturers (at the Dec, 2012 program) included faculty from the Child Mind Institute of New York, NIH, Stanford University, The Donders Institute, the University of Cambridge and others.

For questions, e-mail:  fmrivfp@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu

For more information and registration, see:          http://martinos.org/ConnectivityCourse