Understanding the workings of the human brain is one of the most outstanding challenges of our time. A key to gain insight into brain function is to characterise and understand its organisation, structure and connections, the pathways through which information flows to give rise to complex integrated functionality. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has revolutionised neuroscience, as it allows us to probe this organisation at a systems level, non-invasively and in-vivo. In this talk, I will go through recent advances that push the limits of functional and diffusion MRI for performing inferences on brain connectivity and (micro)structure. I will present examples of how this information can be used to explore brain organisation and re-organisation, characterise individual variability and eventually determine factors that contribute to the individual signature of cognitive function and behaviour
Dr Stamatios Sotiropoulos obtained his degree in electronic & computer engineering from the Technical University of Crete and his MSc in biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He did his PhD at the University of Nottingham, where he specialised on developing brain image analysis technology for exploring brain organisation. Since 2010, he has been at the Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB), University of Oxford. As a principal investigator he works at the interface between image analysis, computational inference and MRI physics. Specifically, his expertise is in biophysical modelling of brain connections at different scales using MRI, both for resolving tissue microstructural patterns and long-range pathways. He has been a major contributor to worldwide initiatives for mapping human brain connections, such as the adult and the baby Human Connectome Projects. He is an editorial board member of NeuroImage, the main journal in the field, and he is one of the developers of FSL, the most widely used open-source software worldwide for brain image analysis.
