Hizlari gonbidatua: Fernanda Ribeiro. Where form meets function: Predicting topographic maps of the human visual cortex from brain anatomy

What: Where form meets function:Predicting topographic maps of the human visual cortex from brain anatomy

Where: BCBL Auditorium and Auditorium zoom room (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Fernanda Ribeiro, PhD, Posdoctoral Researcher, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany

When:  Thursday,  Feb 19th at 12:00 PM noon.

Our brains create representations of the outside world, resembling miniature maps of the sensory stimuli we are exposed to, including what we see, feel, and hear. These representations appear as continuous functional gradients that span extensive parts of the brain, following a fundamental organisation principle: adjacent neurons in the brain represent adjacent features in the sensory world. For example, in the visual cortex, neurons encode spatial location in the visual field. Traditionally, measuring these brain maps in humans requires specialised, lengthy fMRI scans, making it difficult to study them across large numbers of people. However, these maps have a remarkably consistent layout across different individuals, suggesting they are closely tied to brain structure. This means we can predict them from anatomy alone. Accordingly, building on the structure-function relationship in the human visual cortex, my work has successfully leveraged deep learning to capture the complex relationship between the visual field representation (or retinotopic organisation) and the underlying anatomical properties of the visual cortex at the individual level. In this talk, I will discuss our recent work in scaling and generalising this approach, showing that large-scale, anatomy-driven mapping of functional organisation is both possible and reliable.