Tamara Vanderwal
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- Movie + OCD = This project creates and tests a novel movie stimulus designed specifically to evoke symptoms of OCD while participants are undergoing fMRI scans. The goal is to identify a disorder-specific network that has clinical relevance at the individual-subject level. 听Analytic approaches will include machine-based learning algorithmes (e.g., Connectome Predictive Modeling) and intersubject approaches. 听The longterm goal is to turn this project into a multi-site pediatric study.
- Precision mapping in female youth with depression = This project aims to track brain changes as individual female patiens with depression get better. We use movie-fMRI to collect long brain scans longitudinally in youth. We also aim to better understand the effects of normally occuring hormonal changes on functional brain organization in these indiviuals. 听
- Pediatric hyperalignment = Brain scans from different participants in a study are usually lined up with each other according to structural landmarks. This project tests a different approach that uses brain function to line up children's brains. We think this may provide a powerful methodological improvement that would improve signal-to-noise ratios in pediatric fMRI studies. 听
- Movie + Neurosurgery = This project is at the early beginning stage. We want to make a movie that evokes multiple language functions at the individual patient level. The goal is to enable precise mapping of crucial language networks in even very young pediatric patients who have to undergo neurosurgery. 听
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ADVICE AND INSIGHTS FROM 亚洲天堂 FACULTY ON REACHING OUT TO SUPERVISORS
These videos contain some general advice from faculty across 亚洲天堂 on finding and reaching out to a potential thesis supervisor.
Graduate Student Supervision
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Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
The field of precision psychiatry aims to use biologically based data from individual subjects to shift the focus from the group to the individual for diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of psychiatric disorders. The type of data used for precision psychiatry can vary, and the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data has shown promising results. However, this endeavor has been limited by the quality of fMRI data. Specifically, for fMRI data to be clinically useful, measures of functional connectivity (FC) must be reliable across repeated scans and sensitive to individual differences in connectivity. Further, we must be able to collect fMRI scans of sufficient length. Ongoing attempts to address these issues focus on methodological techniques, but acquisition state has been overlooked. fMRI scans for precision psychiatry are almost exclusively collected during resting-state, when participants lay in the scanner and stare at a fixation cross. The rapidly advancing field of movie-fMRI offers important advantages for data quality and quantity: it improves reliability, facilitates the detection of individual differences, and enables the collection of longer scans with better head motion and arousal. These advantages have been demonstrated at the whole-brain level, but it is not clear whether they apply to brain regions specifically important in psychiatry. Hence, we hypothesized that, relative to resting-state, movie-fMRI would improve data quality in three psychiatrically relevant brain regions: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ), and the right pre-supplementary motor area. To test this hypothesis, we compared three measures of test-retest reliability (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Image Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, Discriminability) and one proxy for the sensitivity to individual difference (a test-retest identification algorithm) between movie-watching and resting-state data from the open-source Human Connectome Project data. We also investigated the effect of increasing data amount on these measures. We found that movies were either equal, or superior, to rest across all measures in the three brain regions of interest, with the TPJ showing the most benefit from movies. Overall, our results suggest that movie-fMRI appears to be a good candidate acquisition state to optimize FC quality and quantity for precision psychiatry.
Publications
- (2022)
PLOS ONE, 17 (4), e0265112 - (2021)
- (2020)
NeuroImage, - (2019)
NeuroImage, - (2019)
NeuroImage, 184, 161--170 - (2019)
- (2019)
Biological Psychiatry, 86 (4), 315--326 - (2018)
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, - (2018)
eneuro, 5 (1), ENEURO.0244--17.2017 - (2017)
NeuroImage, 157, 521--530 - (2017)
bioRxiv, - (2017)
GigaScience, 6 (2), 1--14 - (2016)
- (2016)
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 55 (8), 641--642 - (2015)
NeuroImage, 122, 222--232 - (2013)
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 52 (6), 562--565 - (2008)
NeuroImage, 41 (4), 1437--1446
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