The Mind Research Network (MRN) is sponsoring a presentation on Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 11:45 AM in MRN’s Large Conference Room. The title of the presentation is “Working memory in schizophrenia: regions, circuits, and genetic network” by Jessica A. Turner, Ph.D. Project Scientist, Dept of Psychiatry and Human Behavior,University of California, Irvine; Project Manager, Functional Imaging Biomedical Informatics Research Network (FBIRN)
She will discuss ways functional neuroimaging studies in health and disease have moved beyond the simplest questions (such as which regions are activated by which tasks) and into problems focused on whole brain patterns (i.e. which circuits correlate with each other across the entire brain.)
To address these types of questions, much larger data sets are required which make multi-site studies increasingly important. She will review the methods developed by the Functional Imaging Biomedical Informatics Research Network (FBIRN) for calibrating, collecting, processing, and databasing functional neuroimaging data from across multiple collection sites.
The methods and tools developed by FBIRN are now available to the community so large data sets can be systematically produced that are amenable to more sophisticated data analyses. She will present a series of increasingly complex analyses of a single data set: the working memory task used in the FBIRN multi-site schizophrenia study.
The event is free and the public is welcome. For more information about the work of the MRN, http://www.mrn.org/25.html