Dr. Wismüller's research group will present two talks at The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA®) this year titled Mutual connectivity analysis with graph theoretic measures for identifying regions with altered functional connectivity in HIV infection and Functional Network Identification in Resting-State Functional MRI Data Using Reduced Dimension Granger Causality. RSNA is an international society of radiologists, medical physicists and other medical professionals from across the globe. It hosts the world's premier radiology forum, drawing approximately 55,000 attendees annually to McCormick Place in Chicago.

Congratulations to Anas Zainul Abidin on winning the best Teaching Assistant Award for the academic year 2014-15. He was awarded for his outstanding efforts by the BME department for the course titled 'Analytical Foundations in BME' during Fall 2014.

Biomedical Engineering PhD student Raul Rodriguez successfully completed his lab rotation on 3D visualization of large-scale effective connectivity networks in the human brain using resting-state functional MRI data.

Raul’s project focused on using novel methods developed in our lab to obtain effective connectivity measures between functional MRI time-series of every pair of voxels in the brain (~10^4 in the full brain) and visualize the functionally connected networks. Connectivity was quantified by computing a causal influence score using Mutual Connectivity Analysis (MCA) followed by segmenting the brain into functionally connected networks using non-metric community detection approaches. To perform such high-resolution effective brain connectivity analysis, Raul accomplished this task by parallelization and distributed computing using both graphics processing units (GPUs) and state-of-the-art parallel computing resources from the Center for Integrated Research Computing at the University of Rochester.

Congratulations to Anas on receiving an 'Honorable Mention' in the best poster award category at the SPIE Medical Imaging 2015 Conference in Orlando, Florida, for the study titled “Combining mutual information and non-metric clustering for functional connectivity analysis in resting-state functional MRI”. This publication was co-authored by Xixi Wang, Mahesh B. Nagarajan, Adora M. DSouza, Susan K. Hobbs, and Axel Wismüller.

Anas Zainul Abidin and Adora DSouza have received travel grants from the Wismüller Lab to attend and present at the SPIE Medical Imaging 2015 Conference in Orlando, Florida, from Feb 21st – Feb 26th. They will give three oral presentations and present two scientific posters.

The three oral presentations are entitled “Nonlinear functional connectivity network recovery in the human brain with mutual connectivity analysis (MCA): convergent cross-mapping and non-metric clustering”, “Characterizing trabecular bone structure for assessing vertebral fracture risk on volumetric quantitative computed tomography” and “Volumetric characterization of human patellar cartilage matrix on phase contrast x-ray computed tomography”.

In addition, they will present two scientific posters entitled “Functional connectivity analysis in resting state fMRI with echo-state networks and non-metric clustering for network structure recovery”, and “Combining mutual information and non-metric clustering for functional connectivity analysis in resting-state functional MRI”.