Current Projects

Naturalistic assessment of language and emotion

FNIBI / Current Projects, Grants / Aphasia, Current Projects, Diffusion MRI, Eye-tracking, Facial Recording, Functional MRI, Language Task, Neuroimaging, Participate in a Study, Presurgical Planning /

September 26, 2023

Naturalistic paradigms hold enormous potential for studying abnormal brain function. However, the development of clinical applications based on naturalistic approaches is still in its infancy. Our symposium at OHBM 2023 presented the challenges and recent advances in research directed at clinical translation of naturalistic paradigms for brain mapping. See here if you are interested in participating.

The project titled “Naturalistic Neuroimaging for Presurgical Language Mapping” funded by the NIH/NIDCD, aims to evaluate movie fMRI language mapping in neurosurgical patients with varying levels of language function. As part of this project, we evaluate the comprehension and expression elicited by movie-watching, versus conventional language mapping paradigms (covert sentence completion, covert antonym generation, passive story listening), in individuals with stroke-induced aphasia and healthy controls. Language performance is assessed after each paradigm with explicit language tasks based on the stimulus material presented in the paradigm, as well as with implicit measures. We predict that language performance will be comparable, and in most individuals with aphasia superior, for movie-watching relative to the other paradigms. See, our pilot data for this project in this paper.

DynAMos: “The Dynamic Affective Movie Clip Database for Subjectivity Analysis” is a new video database that includes holistic and dynamic emotion ratings from over 100 participants watching 22 affective movie clips. Recognizing the subjectivity inherent to emotional experiences, we provide in the database the full distribution of all participants’ ratings. We argue that this choice represents a paradigm shift with the potential to unlock new research directions, generate new hypotheses, and inspire novel methods in the Affective Computing community. There are several interdisciplinary use cases for the database: to provide dynamic norms for emotion elicitation studies (e.g., in psychology, medicine, and neuroscience), to train and test affective content analysis algorithms (e.g., for dynamic emotion recognition, video summarization, and movie recommendation), and to study subjectivity in emotional reactions (e.g., to identify moments of emotional ambiguity or ambivalence within movies, identify predictors of subjectivity, and develop personalized affective content analysis algorithms). The database is made freely available to researchers for noncommercial use at https://dynamos.mgb.org.

Modulation of the OCD neural network by conventional treatment

FNIBI / Current Projects / Actigraphy, Approach-Avoidance, Behavioral Task, Current Projects, Diffusion MRI, Eye-tracking, Functional MRI, Longitudinal, Neurocircuitry of OCD, Neuroimaging, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Repeated Measures, Smartphone /

September 1, 2022

This is a neuroimaging study conducted at McLean Hospital which is focused on studying changes in functional brain network architecture in patients with OCD over the course of intensive, residential treatment.

Context-Adaptive Multimodal Informatics for Psychiatric Discharge Planning

FNIBI / Current Projects / Actigraphy, Audio Diary Recording, Bipolar Disorder, Current Projects, Depression, Discharge Planning, Dyadic Recording, Ecological Momentary Assessment, Electronic Health Record, Facial Recording, Inpatient, Longitudinal, Road to Recovery, Schizophrenia, Smartphone, Social Signal Processing Algorithms /

January 1, 2022

Determining when a patient is ready for discharge is an open problem, as currently 20% of those hospitalized for psychiatric illness will be hospitalized again within 30 days. To address this issue, we are working to identify behavioral biomarkers for severe mental illness in 400 inpatients hospitalized for psychosis at McLean. The Multisense project is a collaboration with Dr. with LP Morency‘s team at Carnegie Mellon University, where information is extracted from both audio and video of both clinician and patient during a series of semi-structured inpatient interviews. Multimodal analysis techniques are used both to predict clinical scale and discharge-readiness scores, as well as to visualize a summary of each interview and extract relevant interpretable features.

Detecting activity during mental health hospitalization using wearable devices

FNIBI / Current Projects / Actigraphy, Current Projects, Electronic Health Record, Inpatient /

March 1, 2020

Inpatient psychiatric treatment settings provide care for individuals with a range of behavioral disturbances and psychopathology, which often manifests as profound alterations in the amount and nature of physical behavior. We aim to establish an efficient and consistent process to identify clinically significant levels of physical activity (e.g., sleep, restlessness, agitation) that could both prove useful for quantifying the overall level treatment success or failure in an individual patient, while also eventually providing real time support for clinical staff on the unit.

Neurogenetic analysis in unipolar and bipolar depression

FNIBI / Current Projects / Bipolar Disorder, Current Projects, Depression, Facial Recording, fMRI, Neurocognitive Tasks, Neuroimaging, Schizophrenia, SCID /

December 1, 2019

This is a neuroimaging study conducted in collaboration with Avram Holmes’ lab at Yale University focusing on neurogenetic factors related to unipolar and bipolar depression.