Application to human imaging data?


#1

Dear all,
I just heard about this project in a recent presentation by Felix Schürmann. It sounds great. Our lab does human neuroimaging (high resolution functional MRI), and we distinguish CA1 from the other subfields. I am wondering if your project could eventually contribute to a generative model to help us explain our observations. Specifically, I have three questions:

A. Human / primate CA1 is characterised by vast connectivity with cortex, as well as input from within the hippocampus. Do you distinguish intrinsic / extrinsic CA1 connections in your model?

B. Are you modelling longitudinal (dorso-ventral) CA1 fibres?

C. Are you limiting the project to CA1, or are you planning to model all subfields? And if the latter, how many years of work do you think this will be, before there’s the basis of a working model?

All the best,
Peter

Peter Zeidman, PhD
Methods Group
Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging
12 Queen Square
London WC1N 3BG


#2

Dear Peter,

First of all, I apologize for the delay in answering your question - unfortunately, proper notifications have not been set up in the HBP Forum, so we discovered your question only two days ago.

I thank you for your interest in our work. Although I sincerely hope that, eventually, our modeling work will be relevant to your research, I note that this is very much work in progress, and it is also seen as a community enterprise, so the pace (and also the direction!) of development will depend very much on input from people outside the Human Brain Project.

I should also point out that, although the ultimate aim of the HBP is naturally to model the human brain, we are currently developing and testing our tools mainly on the use case of the mouse (and rat) brain, where, in most domains, much more data are available. However, more and more work on modeling the human brain can be expected in later phases of the project.

To answer your questions more specifically, we started modeling on the CA1 subfield, but we are now extending it to CA3, the DG, and even CA2 (of the mouse and rat). We will first focus on intrinsic hippocampal connectivity (and we are working in 3D, so that should also include longitudinal fibers), and will later add extrinsic connectivity, eventually in the form of directly interfacing with models of other parts of the brain (entorhinal cortex, prefrontal cortex, thalamus, medial septum, etc.).

Please let us know if you have any further questions or comments - as I said earlier, we are trying to develop tools (and models) that are useful for the community, so feedback is essential for us.

Best regards,

Szabolcs


Szabolcs Káli

Laboratory of Cerebral Cortex Research
Institute of Experimental Medicine
Hungarian Academy of Sciences

H-1083 Budapest Szigony utca 43.
Phone: +36-1-2109413
Fax: +36-1-2109412
E-mail: kali.szabolcs@koki.mta.hu
www.koki.mta.hu