ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0428-427X
Date of Award
Spring 5-15-2017
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
The brain is a network functionally organized at many spatial and temporal scales. To understand how the brain processes information, controls behavior and dynamically adapts to an ever-changing environment, it is critical to have a comprehensive description of the constituent elements of this network and how relationships between these elements may change over time. Decades of lesion studies, anatomical tract-tracing, and electrophysiological recording have given insight into this functional organization. Recently, however, resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has emerged as a powerful tool for whole-brain non-invasive measurement of spontaneous neural activity in humans, giving ready access to macroscopic scales of functional organization previously much more difficult to obtain. This thesis aims to harness the unique combination of spatial and temporal resolution provided by functional MRI to explore the spatial and temporal properties of the functional organization of the brain. First, we establish an approach for defining cortical areas using transitions in correlated patterns of spontaneous BOLD activity (Chapter 2). We then propose and apply measures of internal and external validity to evaluate the credibility of the areal parcellation generated by this technique (Chapter 3). In chapter 4, we extend the study of functional brain organization to a highly sampled individual. We describe the idiosyncratic areal and systems-level organization of the individual relative to a standard group-average description. Further, we develop a model describing the reliability of BOLD correlation estimates across days that accounts for relevant sources of variability. Finally, in Chapter 5, we examine whether BOLD correlations meaningfully vary over the course of single resting-state scans.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Steven E. Petersen
Committee Members
David Van Essen, Bradley Schlaggar, Olaf Sporns, Marcus Raichle,
Recommended Citation
Laumann, Timothy, "Functional Brain Organization in Space and Time" (2017). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1122.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1122
Comments
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/K7G73C4G