Prof. Ming-Hung (Jason) Kao : Recent developments in optimal experimental designs for functional MRI

Posted by Min Yang , part of the Statistics and Data Science Seminar.

At

April 16, 2014, 4 p.m.

In

SEO 636

Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the leading brain mapping technologies for studying brain activity in response to mental stimuli. For neuroimaging studies utilizing this pioneering technology, there is a great demand of high-quality experimental designs that help to collect informative data to make precise and valid inference about brain functions. In this talk, I briefly introduce some recently developed analytical and computational results on fMRI experimental designs. The performance of some commonly considered designs such as m-sequences is discussed. In addition, a new type of fMRI designs that are constructed using a certain type of Hadamard matrices is also discussed. Under certain assumptions, these designs can be shown to be optimal in some statistically meaningful sense. Some possible future research directions are also presented.