BrainHygge talk in May will be by:
Janus Rønn Lind Kobbersmed
Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN)

Title: "One-shot normative modelling of whole-brain functional connectivity"

ABSTRACT:

Many brain diseases and disorders lack objective measures of brain function as indicators of pathology. The search for brain function biomarkers is complicated by the fact that these conditions are often heterogenous and described as a spectrum from normal to abnormal rather than a sick-healthy dichotomy. Normative modelling addresses these challenges by characterizing the normal variation of brain measurements given sex and age. Abnormalities are then identified as deviations from this norm. In fMRI studies, brain function is often assessed as functional connectivity (FC), calculated as the correlation matrix of activity between pairs of brain regions. Current normative modelling studies have mainly focused on predicting the pairwise FC individually rather than the full FC matrix, thereby ignoring its structure and generating a large number of hypotheses. Here, motivated by the fact that brain diseases often affect the interplay between multiple brain regions rather than isolated pairs, we adapt a newly developed statistics method for the needs of normative modelling. Using this new approach, which we termed Functional Connectivity Integrative Normative Modelling (FUNCOIN), and resting-state fMRI data from UK Biobank, we propose a whole-brain FC normative model through two sex- and age-dependent projections, which successfully characterize the normal range of FC. Thereby, the model identifies network-level changes associated with sex and age which traditional elementwise methods cannot reveal. On that basis, we found that subjects with Parkinson’s disease were significantly, and substantially, more likely than healthy subjects to exhibit abnormal FC patterns even on scans up to 5.5 years before diagnosis.

Read more about Janus Rønn Lind Kobbersmed:
https://cfin.au.dk/staff/show/person/janus@cfin.au.dk

ALL ARE WELCOME