Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ReCiModel (Multimodal characterization of the visual word form area: An integrative computational model)
Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2021-08-31
• I repeated the analyses in the right hemisphere, and I just finished writing the manuscript.
• I am performing a highly detailed work in individual space as well, trying to quantify how well these results hold at the individual subject level. This is still ongoing.
• The resting state and functional localizer data is being used in a project to compare two different types of functional connectivity. This work is in the writing phase.
• I directed a Master Thesis and we used this dataset to analyse the structural connectivity of the VOTC with the IFG. The Master Thesis was defended in July 2021, paper is almost finished as well.
• This project led to some past and ongoing collaborations as well. One of those collaborations was already published in Nature Communications.
I was able to work in state-of-the art neuroimaging tools and procedures to accomplish the last objective of the project: creating a model and baseline of healthy readers. In order to create models that can be used across scanners and be useful outside the research environment, I started working on quantitative MRI methods and the translation of research findings to the clinic, trying to find ways of identifying differences at the individual subject level. I developed a conceptual and experimental project to understand the replication and generalization in applied neuroimaging, and the result of that work was published in the journal NeuroImage. In order to have a platform to validate the results of our analyses, I worked in a software validation platform because I wanted to apply it to a quantitative fMRI models (population receptive fields -pRF-). This work was recently published in PLOS Computational Biology.
Regretfully, the fourth objective is still ongoing. The results will need to wait at least one year. I was relying on BCBL’s data acquisition efforts with a large dyslexic cohort. This work has been significantly delayed mostly due to COVID. Nevertheless, I was able to do other significant work with the methods I developed. I applied one of the methods to show that the receptive fields in early visual cortex are nearly circular (published early 2021 at Journal of Neuroscience). Additionally, I’ve been exploring other datasets that could help with the modelling and differentiation of the dyslexic population. In one very exciting result, we help interpret sensory and cognitive signals in visual and reading areas. This work has been posted to a preprint server (bioRxiv) and is under review in the journal Nature Communications.