Imaging Brain Disorders

Prof. Sylvain Bouix - Associate Director, Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.

Oct. 18, 2019, 1:30 p.m. - Oct. 18, 2019, 2:30 p.m.

Wilson Hall 105 [3506 Rue University]

Hosted by: Prof. Kaleem Siddiqi


Modern neuroimaging techniques, in particular Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), have revolutionized the study of the human brain in health and disease. MRI provides refined structural and functional information about the brain in vivo, allowing neuroscientists to investigate brain disorders with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity. The need to process, analyze and interpret the information contained in large MRI datasets has also provided opportunities and challenges for computer scientists to develop algorithms to facilitate the analysis of medical images. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of the technical and clinical work being conducted at the Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory at Harvard Medical School, with a special focus on the analysis of diffusion MRI (dMRI). dMRI is a leading and unique modality for studying the human brain’s tissue microstructure and structural connectivity in vivo, and is extensively used by clinicians and researchers (over 300,000 publications in Google Scholar) to identify changes that accompany brain disorders and to understand how the brain develops and ages.

Bio: A computer scientist by training, Sylvain has been working with the Psychiatry NeuroImaging Laboratory since 2003. He received his B.Eng. from Institut Polytechnique de Sevenans, France his M.Sc. from the University of Kansas and his Ph.D. from McGill University. His research interests include shape analysis of anatomical structures and evaluation of medical imaging techniques. His main duty is to act as a mediator between computer scientists and neuroscientists to help improve computer tools for neuroimaging studies.