BME Seminar Series: Imaging Brain Dynamics, Melanin and Iron with MRI

Abstract: While MRI has been widely used to image brain structure for more than four decades, research in the past three decades has ushered in a number of MRI-based avenues for studying the brain beyond its anatomy, either in normal subjects or neuropsychiatric patients. With MRI, it is now possible to noninvasively map brain function, physiology, microstructure and neurobiologically relevant biomarkers such as iron and melanin. In this talk, I will first present our work on brain dynamics, including using hidden Markov models to characterize it, using deep learning to extract dynamic features for classification, applying phase-space embedding for ascertaining nonlinear dynamics and utilizing these methods in the study of neuropsychiatric disorders. Second, I will describe our work on the development of neuromelanin imaging and combining it with iron imaging for the diagnosis and assessment of Parkinson’s disease.

Bio: Xiaoping Hu earned his doctorate in medical physics in 1988 from the University of Chicago. From 1990 to 2002, he was a faculty member at the University of Minnesota where he became a full professor in 1998. In 2002-2016, he was professor and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Imaging in the Wallace H. Coulter joint department of biomedical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. In July 2016, Hu joined UC Riverside as professor and chair of bioengineering and director of center advanced neuroimaging. Hu has worked on the development and biomedical application of magnetic resonance imaging, with an emphasis on the brain, for almost four decades. He has authored or co-authored more than 310 peer-reviewed journal articles, with a total of more than 30,000 citations and an h-index of 92. He is currently on the editorial board of Brain Connectivity and an associate editor of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. He is a fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance, a fellow of IEEE, a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and a fellow of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.