statistical connectomics: brain-graph modeling, inference and analysis
Connectomes, or brain-graphs, can be inferred using a wide variety of neuroscientific experimental paradigms, spanning both spatial and temporal scales. We are currently engaged in developing methods for:
- connectome inference from calcium imaging, diffusion and structural MRI (Mr. Cap), and fMRI.
- analysis of brain-graphs by refining statistical brain-graph models that admit efficient algorithms for various decision-theoretic tasks.
mentalomes: a complete collective consciousness
In analogy with connectomes, our mentalomes are the complete set of properties represented by our brains, one's beliefs, predispositions, psychiatric state, memories, etc. By building upon the models developed for brain-graph analyses, and combining those insights with mentalome measurements (e.g., intelligence, gender, etc.), we can begin to unravel the relationship between our minds and our brains.
shalomes: fusing all our 'omes
While our connectomes may encode much about our mentalomes, neither is a complete picture of any individual. For instance, neither our connectomes nor our mentalomes may contain all available information about whether we are likely to develop caner. Our genomes, however, do have this additional information. We therefore introduce the notion of a shalome: the complete 'ome of an individual, containing their connectome, the genome of every cell, their mentalome, etc. We hope to contribute to our ability to fuse data from these distinct domains to obtain novel insights with regard to the human condition.
applications
The above described tools are amenable to myriad neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric applications. At the moment, we are pursuing applying them to various psychological properties (e.g., intelligence, creativity, etc.), psychiatric states (e.g., PTSD, MCI), and other properties (e.g., gender). We are always interesting in establishing new collaborations. Our brain-graph inference and analysis code bases are working and our servers have extra space, so please enquire if interested.
philosophy
We like to believe that our work is a natural extension of our philosophies of things. Perhaps it is sometimes. Regardless, we often find it fun and illuminating to attempt to serious write down our philosophy. One current example is our work on supervenience. Stay tuned for more works on related topics that are current under development.
calcium imaging
My PhD was devoted to developing tools for the analysis of dynamic calcium imaging data. Please see optophysiology for more details.