Engineers present at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference

The research of several Oakland University faculty and students from the School of Engineering and Computer Science will be presented at the upcoming SPIE Medical Imaging Conference, to be held in San Diego, California this February. SPIE is an international society that promotes interdisciplinary research in optics and photonics.

Engineering Biology undergraduate major Mobin Anandwala is the lead author of a presentation in the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging session about simulation of fMRI signals to validate dynamic causal modeling estimation. Coauthors include CBR member and Assistant Professor Mohammad-Reza Siadat, of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and graduate student Shamil Hadi, studying in the Computer Science and Informatics PhD program. Their abstract reads

Through cognitive tasks certain brain areas are activated neutrally and also receive increased blood to them. This is modeled through a state system consisting of two separate parts one that deals with the neural node stimulation and the other blood response during that stimulation. Using the forward Euler's method this system was approximated in a series of difference equations and plotted. Both neural signals and hemodynamic signals were of low amplitude as shown in the plots. The importance of modeling this system is to not only have a model for neural response but also to compare to actual data.

A presentation in the session on Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Brain Structure and Function discusses the negative BOLD response and serotonin concentration within rostral subgenual portion of the anterior cingulate cortex for long-allele carriers during perceptual processing of emotional tasks. OU authors include Hadi and Siadat.

A negative blood oxygen level - dependent (BOLD) has been associated with a high concentration of GABA using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and fMRI. Subjects with long-allele carriers have seen with high concentration of serotonin in Rostral Subgenual portion of the anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). In this paper, we investigate the effect of serotonin concentration on hemodynamic responses. Our results show a negative BOLD signal in rACC in the subjects with long-allele carriers. In contrast, the subjects with short-allele carriers showed positive BOLD signals in rACC. These results suggest that the serotonin transporter gene impacts the neuronal activity and eventually the BOLD signal similar to GABA.

Finally, Hadi and Siadat present a poster describing a comparison between subjects with long- and short-allele carriers in the BOLD signal within amygdala during emotional tasks.

Strong blood oxygen level - dependent (BOLD) signal is generated in the left amygdala in subjects with short-allele carriers during cognitive emotional stimuli. Given the evidence that serotonin is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Also, reduced Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) -amygdala connectivity in subjects with short-allele carriers provides a potential mechanistic account for the observed increase in amygdala activity. Our study showed that subjects with long-allele carriers have negative BOLD signal as opposed to subjects with short-allele carriers. This is due to lower concentration of serotonin in ACC of subjects with short-allele carriers and hence a weak feedback from Rostral Subgenual Portion of the ACC (rACC) back to amygdala.

More News, added February 7, 2012: Shamil Hadi has received an Honorable Mention Poster Award from the conference