We support University of Pittsburgh graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and medical students through our home departments of Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Here are some of our current and past academic research endeavors.
MRI data and image processing provide the statistical data needed to answer research questions, and continue to be a mainstay of academic neuroimaging research. We use scripting languages such as Matlab, python, and bash, to denoise and prepare data for analysis, including multimodal registration.
Tissue imaging modalities such as T1w MRI provide exciting ways to study anatomical correlates of mental illness, such as regional volume and shape changes, or through the lens of structural covariance networks (SCNs).
Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) allows the chemical compositions of individual brain voxels to be analyzed. Proton ( 1H) MRS measures neurotransmitters while phosphorus (31P) MRS measures membrane phospholipid metabolites that index synaptic density and dendritic arborizations. A schematic of the biological basis of 31P MRS is presented above. Dynamic changes in neurotransmitters can be measures using 1H MRS allowing researchers to study the time -course of neurotransmitter changes during cognitive tasks, which may be an indispensable tool for understanding the role of neurotransmitter response associated with cognition and psychopathology.
Graph theory is an important tool for neuroimaging research, where researchers have long relied on functional network of regional co-activation, or connectivity networks measured using diffusion MRI techniques. We use graph theory to bridge MRI data collected from different "modalities" like structural, functional MRI. These multiplex network representations allow for advanced machine learning and statistical analysis techniques to be used on the complex, high dimensional in-vivo MRI data.
High-performance computing is an essential part of data operations. In addition to a physical computer lab, we maintain a local cluster computer, and process data on both the University of Pittsburgh CRC and the PSC Bridges-2 systems.