RESEARCH

Currently formulating a temporal ICA on the resting BOLD fMRI dataset to ascertain the underlying subcortical connectivity and its association with the structural connectivity of the white matter fiber bundles extracted from diffusion tensor data. The associations are further examined to deepen our understanding of cortico-subcortical connectivity in the context of brain aging and cognition.

Devised an automated data importation paradigm to improve efficiency of the research study. The paradigm consists of IPython command line suite coalesced with complex algorithms to achieve maximal efficiency in data organization and importation, rapid data reconstruction, perform quality control and spatial normalization, by allocating jobs on the cluster (running Oracle Grid Engine).

Implemented a processing algorithm on the resting BOLD fMRI data to produce a graph of 264 putative functional nodes intersecting with a spherical mask to obtain a region of interest mask for each of the nodes, thus resulting in a single fMRI time-series for each node.

Developed a robust data modeling algorithm for task-based fMRI brain data by creating a model-fit for the data and generating an accurate nonparametric extrapolation of time series autocorrelation to prewhiten each voxel's time series.

Evaluated Braak stages of tau protein accumulation by streamlining an extensive algorithm which registers the tau PET images to the native space, composes a white and gray matter mask and computes the regional volume, mean uptake value and standard uptake value.

Formulated algorithms to extract fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity and axial diffusivity from the diffusion tensor data. Furthermore, constructed and streamlined a data extracting algorithm to evaluate the white matter hyper intensity burden from the FLAIR data.

Designed a quality control pipeline by supplementing a SQlite database which can be accessed through a custom command-line and graphical user interface to ensure data reliability. Additionally, devised a MySQL database management system to unify the fMRI behavioral data and cognitive study data on thousands of participants.