The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science Presents a Series of Seminars on Brain Imaging

The department’s brain imaging team, led by lab director Chrissy DeLorenzo PhD, is presenting a series of 12 seminars on topics related to brain imaging. More than 30 people attended the first session on November 20, 2012.

Department Chair, Ramin Parsey MD, PhD, explained that the series was spawned by requests from people who were interested in knowing more about how brain imaging can be used in research or clinical practice. He promised that the presentations would be non-technical—“no slides full of equations,” he said. In her introduction, Dr. DeLorenzo said that the seminars are intended “to stimulate a dialogue about currently available imaging techniques, the kind of information we can extract from these techniques and what we do with that information in clinical research studies.”

The sessions will cover the modalities that are most commonly used in psychiatry. Four sessions will focus on how quantitative information can be extracted from images. At the opening session Dr. DeLorenzo gave an overview of brain imaging techniques; Arno Klein PhD introduced techniques for processing, analyzing and visualizing magnetic resonance images of the brain; Doreen Olvet PhD discussed EEG and event-related potentials and Francesca Zanderigo PhD gave a preview of quantification, which she described as “the very messy business behind the beautiful images.”

Additional sessions will be held on consecutive Tuesdays at 5:00 PM through February 19, 2013 except for December 25 and January 1. The seminars will be held in Lecture Hall 3 on Level 2 of the HSC except for December 11th which will be in the Psychiatry Large CR, HSC-T-10. The seminars are free and open to everyone.

To see a videotape of the seminars which have been presented click here.

To see a schedule of the seminars to be presented click here.