Abstract

Speaker: Wietske van der Zwaag (Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, Amsterdam)

Bio: Dr Wietske van der Zwaag received her PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, in 2006, working with one of the first European 7T scanners. She subsequently worked at the Centre d’Imagerie Biomédicale (CIBM) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) from 2007 to 2015. Van der Zwaag joined the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging in 2015, shortly after its opening. In 2019, she formed her own group there, working at the boundary between MR development and neurosciences. The group’s research is centred on best harnessing the strong points of 7T in neuroimaging with a special interest in functional MRI of finely organized brain structures, such as the human cerebellum.

Title: Studies with Single Subjects or Large Numbers of Volunteers – Why, & How?

Abstract: In the functional MRI field, datasets continue to grow. Interestingly, there are two different trends: There are currently multiple efforts towards collection of datasets with a huge number of participants, to capture the variance in a population, or to use the power of massive averaging to discover subtle brain function patterns. A second trend is towards exhaustive sampling of a single participant (or a few), arguing that measurements of one brain likely generalize to most other brains. Dense sampling allows experiments with either many conditions or extremely detailed images, exploring different types of variance. This talk will discuss both trends.

Venue: MRC CBU West Wing Seminar Room and Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82385113580?pwd=RmxIUmphQW9Ud1JBby9nTDQzR0NRdz09