
Lifespan Informatics & Neuroimaging Center
Innovation in data science and translational neuroscience to understand brain development and mental illness

RESEARCH
Our research uses advanced analytics to integrate complex brain images and rich behavioral data. Ultimately, we seek to map normal brain development and understand how alterations in brain maturation increase risk of psychiatric illness.
.jpg)
Arielle S. Keller
bioRxiv
Personalized Functional Brain Network Topography and Cognition
Individual differences in cognition during childhood are associated with important social, physical, and mental health outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Quantifying variation in the total spatial representation of functional brain networks across the developing cortex may provide insight regarding individual differences in cognition. We test this idea by defining personalized functional networks that account for inter-individual heterogeneity in 9-10 year olds from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. Across thousands of individuals, the total cortical representation of personalized networks could predict youth cognition. These results establish that heterogeneity in functional network topography is associated with individual differences in cognition before the critical transition into adolescence.
.png)
Sydney Covitz
NeuroImage
Curation of BIDS (CuBIDS)
CuBIDS is a neuroinformatics workflow and open-source Python-based software package designed to facilitate reproducible curation of neuroimaging data. CuBIDS also helps users summarize, categorize, and visualize the metadata heterogeneity present in their BIDS data, test pipelines on their dataset's entire parameter space, and perform metadata-based quality control.
.jpeg)
Valerie Sydnor
bioRxiv
Characterizing the Spatiotemporal Sequence of Cortical Plasticity
Leveraging intrinsic activity amplitude as a functional marker of plasticity, we find evidence for a cortical gradient of neurodevelopmental plasticity in youth. Declines in the amplitude of intrinsic activity were initiated heterochronously across regions, coupled to the maturation of a plasticity breaking factor, impacted by children’s developmental environments, and temporally staggered along a sensorimotor-association axis from ages 8 to 18.

ted satterthwaite
Ted is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. His research uses multi-modal neuroimaging to describe both normal and abnormal patterns of brain development, in order to better understand the origins of mental illnesses.