Department seminar by Eardi Lila

Please Note: This seminar will be given online.

Functional random effects modeling of complex brain data

Human brains differ in their structural and functional organization across individuals. There is a long history of trying to relate either structural or functional brain features to human aspects, such as behavioral and cognitive variables. However, more recently, increasing attention has been drawn to the problem of understanding how brain structure and function are related to each other. Motivated by such a problem, I will introduce a statistical framework that can jointly model structural and functional brain image data. We will moreover adopt a Riemannian modeling approach to account for the non-linear geometric constraints that naturally arise in this setting and embed a random-effects component in order to disentangle genetic sources of variability from those driven by unique environmental factors. I will then show the results obtained by applying the proposed model to the Human Connectome Project dataset to explore spontaneous co-variation between brain shape and connectivity in young healthy individuals.