All are welcome (attendance required for graduate students). Lunch is provided.

Xiaoping P. Hu, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Riverside

MRI Imaging of Brain Dynamics and Neurodegenerative Markers

In addition to providing exquisite details of brain anatomy, MRI can also map the function, connectivity, and other important characteristics, such as melanin and iron contents, of the brain. In this talk, I will highlight our work on the methodological development and applications in some of these aspects. The first part will be on the study of brain dynamics with resting-state functional MRI. In this regard, I will describe how we can characterize the brain dynamics with a hidden Markov model, revealing spatiotemporal characteristics of resting state brain, and how to take advantage of the dynamic information in brain segmentation and subject identification. In the second part, I will describe the use of MRI to image brain melanin and iron and their application in the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD), with the potential for early detection.