Lexin Li, PhD, Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology & Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley
The human brain changes dramatically accross development, and such dynamic changes in brain function and structute underlie the innumberable changes in cognition, emotion, and behavior that occur across development. It is thus of great scientific interest to model and understand brain dynamic changes. In this talk, we present two case studies. In the first study, we model the change of brain functional connectivity based on cross-sectional resting-state functinal MRI Imaging. We propose a mixed-effect time-varying stochastic blockmodel. It characterizes the continuous time-varying behavior of the brain network at the population level, meanwhile taking into account both the individual subject variability as well as the prior module information. In the second study, we model the change of brain structure based on longitudinal anatomical MRI imaging. We develop a tensor response regression model. It captures the dynamic change of brain structure, by incorporating proper penalty functions while accounting for substantial missing values.