Purdue’s upcoming hackathon to focus on brain imaging

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue’s CONNplexity Lab will host a hackathon during the fifth Indiana Neuroimaging Symposium that will provide participants with hands-on experience analyzing how the brain works through imaging.   

The Hackathon on Brain Connectomics will be 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday (Nov. 4) in Neil Armstrong Hall, rooms 1109 and 1103. Symposium participants will work with MRI brain connectivity data, both structural and functional, and perform novel types of analysis based on complex networks.

The hackathon will be led by Joaquín Goñi, assistant professor of industrial and biomedical engineering, and Enrico Amico, postdoctoral researcher in his group. The organization of the symposium is led by Ulrike Dydak, associate professor of health sciences.

The hackathon will take place the day after the fifth Indiana Neuroimaging Symposium. This symposium is a joint event by the Imaging Research Facilities at Purdue and the Indiana University School of Medicine. It works to create a venue for researchers who use or are interesting in using neuroimaging techniques to present studies and techniques, as well as build relationships with peers from around the state.  

The hackathon will cover four graph theoretical approaches to assess brain connectivity and give symposium participants the option to focus in on one or several of them, as well as bringing their own connectivity data or using a data set released by the CONNplexity lab. These approaches are:

• Shortest-paths and efficiency in structural connectivity, including the concepts of communicability in complex networks through shortest-paths and different properties of paths such as length, distance and hiddenness.
• Modularity in connectivity-based networks, including the concepts of identifying communities and assessing modularity in connectivity data.
• The recent connICA approach, which allows for the identification of independent connectivity traits in cohorts of functional connectivity data and the linkage of it with cognition and behavior.
• Functional connectivity fingerprinting, including recent methods to measure and improve the capacity of individual fingerprinting and of making network-level associations with cognitive or behavioral measurements.

These events are sponsored by the Purdue College of Engineering, Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience, Purdue College of Health and Human Sciences and the Purdue Systems Collaboratory. 

Writer: Olivia Crouse, ocrouse@purdue.edu 

Purdue News Service contact: Amy Patterson Neubert, 765-494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu 

Sources: Ulrike Dydak, 765-494-0550, udydak@purdue.edu

Joaquín Goñi, jgonicor@purdue.edu