Neuroimaging

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.

Mobile footprinting: linking individual distinctiveness in mobility patterns to mood, sleep, and brain functional connectivity

FNIBI / Featured publications / Digital phenotyping, Neuroimaging, Smartphone /

June 3, 2022

Mapping individual differences in behavior is fundamental to personalized neuroscience, but quantifying complex behavior in real world settings remains a challenge. While mobility patterns captured by smartphones have increasingly been linked to a range of psychiatric symptoms, existing research has not specifically examined whether individuals have person-specific mobility patterns. We collected over 3000 days of mobility data from a sample of 41 adolescents and young adults (age 17–30 years, 28 female) with affective instability. We extracted summary mobility metrics from GPS and accelerometer data and used their covariance structures to identify individuals and calculated the individual identification accuracy—i.e., their “footprint distinctiveness”.

For more information:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01351-z

An Ethics Checklist for Digital Health Research in Psychiatry: Viewpoint

FNIBI / Featured publications / Actigraphy, Digital Health, Digital phenotyping, Ethics, Facial Recording, Neuroimaging, Smartphone /

February 1, 2022

Psychiatry has long needed a better and more scalable way to capture the dynamics of behavior and its disturbances, quantitatively across multiple data channels, at high temporal resolution in real time. By combining 24/7 data—on location, movement, email and text communications, and social media—with brain scans, genetics, genomics, neuropsychological batteries, and clinical interviews, researchers will have an unprecedented amount of objective, individual-level data. Analyzing these data with ever-evolving artificial intelligence could one day include bringing interventions to patients where they are in the real world in a convenient, efficient, effective, and timely way. Yet, the road to this innovative future is fraught with ethical dilemmas as well as ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI).

For more information:

https://www.jmir.org/2022/2/e31146/

The goal of the Ethics Checklist is to promote careful design and execution of research. It is not meant to mandate particular research designs; indeed, at this early stage and without consensus guidance, there are a range of reasonable choices researchers may make. However, the checklist is meant to make those ethical choices explicit, and to require researchers to give reasons for their decisions related to ELSI issues. The Ethics Checklist is primarily focused on procedural safeguards, such as consulting with experts outside the research group and documenting standard operating procedures for clearly actionable data (eg, expressed suicidality) within written research protocols.

We explored the ELSI of digital health research in psychiatry, with a particular focus on what we label “deep phenotyping” psychiatric research, which combines the potential for virtually boundless data collection and increasingly sophisticated techniques to analyze those data. We convened an interdisciplinary expert stakeholder workshop in May 2020, and this checklist emerges out of that dialogue.

Consistent with recent ELSI analyses, we find that existing ethical guidance and legal regulations are not sufficient for deep phenotyping research in psychiatry. At present, there are regulatory gaps, inconsistencies across research teams in ethics protocols, and a lack of consensus among institutional review boards on when and how deep phenotyping research should proceed. We thus developed a new instrument, an Ethics Checklist for Digital Health Research in Psychiatry (“the Ethics Checklist”). The Ethics Checklist is composed of 20 key questions, subdivided into 6 interrelated domains: (1) informed consent; (2) equity, diversity, and access; (3) privacy and partnerships; (4) regulation and law; (5) return of results; and (6) duty to warn and duty to report.

Deep phenotyping research offers a vision for vastly more effective care for people with, or at risk for, psychiatric disease. The potential perils en route to realizing this vision are significant; however, and researchers must be willing to address the questions in the Ethics Checklist before embarking on each leg of the journey.

Bryce Gillis, BA

FNIBI / People / A Year in the Life, Depression Imaging, Digital phenotyping, Neurocircuitry of OCD, Neuroimaging, Road to Recovery /

January 1, 2022

Bryce received his Bachelor’s in psychology from Wesleyan University in 2022 after studying experimental psychopathology using behavioral and electrophysiological methods. Working in two research labs, he helped with data acquisition and analysis for cognitive, judgment and decision-making tasks and auditory oddball tasks using EEG. Now, he is a clinical RA in the Baker Lab working on longitudinal deep phenotyping studies involving functional neuroimaging and clinical interviewing of patients with major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and related mental illnesses. Bryce plans to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology following his time at McLean.

Progressive social withdrawal in trauma-exposed older adolescents and young adults: neurocircuitry predictors

FNIBI / Current Projects / Digital phenotyping, Functional MRI, Neuroimaging, Trauma /

April 1, 2021

In collaboration with Elizabeth Olson, this project aims to identify the contribution of a specific neural circuit to social withdrawal during the transition to adulthood (ages 16-20) in individuals with a history of interpersonal trauma exposure. Active and passive digital phenotyping metrics will be used to assess social withdrawal over the course of a 12-month follow-up. The hypothesis is that baseline functional connectivity within basolateral amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex-nucleus accumbens circuitry will prospectively predict social withdrawal.

A Transdiagnostic Assessment Of Electroconvulsive Therapy Modulation Of Anhedonia And Reward Circuitry: Targets, Biomarkers And Predictors Of Response

FNIBI / Past Projects / Actigraphy, Anhedonia, Electroconvulsive Therapy, Functional MRI, Neuroimaging, Smartphone /

April 1, 2020

In collaboration with Joan Camprodon, the goal of this supplemental project was to capture temporally dense behavioral recordings from individuals receiving ECT and being studied using serial neuroimaging and clinical assessment as part of the parent grant, using smartphones, wearable devices, and audiovisual recordings.

Multimodal Approaches to Neurobiology of Traumatic Dissociation

FNIBI / Current Projects / Dissociation, Functional MRI, Neuroimaging, Trauma /

April 1, 2020

In collaboration with Milissa Kaufman, the goals of this study will be 1) to understand the differential biomarkers that map onto dissociative symptoms, and 2) to understand how these biomarkers may best predict trajectory of response to empirically based standard-of-care treatments. This naturalistic study will allow us to map the biology of dissociation, and importantly, the change in dissociative symptoms and underlying biomarkers over time, using naturalistic evidenced-based treatment for PTSD in 240 treatment-seeking patients with PTSD, and a range of dissociation.

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.

Multimodal Imaging of Hippocampal-Cortical Networks and Mechanisms of Trauma-Related Intrusions

FNIBI / Current Projects / Functional MRI, Neuroimaging, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Trauma /

April 1, 2019

In collaboration with Isabelle Rosso, this study aims to identify brain processes that are associated with distinctive phenomenological characteristics of trauma memories that implicate sensory-perceptual brain networks, and that may be different than canonical brain networks of PTSD.