ELSC Seminar Series

Neuroimaging of brain function is important for our ability to understand how brain and behaviour are linked. Differences between individuals in both brain structure and function limit our ability to identify the brain systems that support cognitive functions at the individual level. Additionally, limitations of spatial and temporal resolution of the available neuroimaging techniques pose a challenge on our ability to understand brain function across scales. In the talk, I will present evidence for individual-oriented cross-modality functional mapping in the human brain in health and disease. I will focus on executive control – a collection of mental processes such as attention, planning and problem solving, which are supported by a distributed frontoparietal network. Using fMRI, we reliably localised the frontoparietal control network in healthy individuals, with a generalised localisation across tasks. We further sought to identify this network in patients with brain tumours in order to improve personalised intervention as part of the surgical procedure. The clinical aim of the surgery is to remove as much as possible of the tumour and at the same time prevent damage to the areas around it to preserve function and enable good quality of life for patients. In a unique setup of awake brain surgery, we identified an electrophysiological signature of the control network in the frontal cortex using electrocorticography (ECOG), which converged with the canonical network as identified with resting-state fMRI. Finally, I will discuss more broadly the new opportunities and challenges of cross-modality precision neuroimaging and its implications for both basic science and clinical applications.