Welcome back to Beyond the Patterns. So today we have a really exciting talk coming up and

today's presenter will be Amy Kuczyjewski who is an associate professor at the Department of Radiology

at Weill Cornell Medicine in Computational Biology of Cornell University. So for the past decade

Amy has been interested in understanding how the human brain works and in order to better

diagnose, prognose and treat neurological disease and injury. The Cocoa Labs main focus is on using

quantitative methods including machine learning applied to multimodal neuroimaging data to map

brain behavior relationships. The labs overall goal is to develop individualized therapies that can

boost neural recovery mechanisms and support recovery after neurological disease or injury.

So it's really exciting to have her here. So the presentation today is entitled Biological

and Artificial Neural Networks and Amy I'm really excited to have you here. I'm very much looking

forward to the presentation and the stage is yours.

Great thank you so much for that generous introduction and I'm so happy to be here today.

I went through some of your speakers and I was super excited to see some of my colleagues and

other people that I've seen give talks so hopefully I can hold a candle to their talks as well.

And so Andreas I kind of told you about what I do and today I'm going to be telling you a little

bit about something that I've been doing recently that's a little bit of a departure that seems like

it's a little bit of a departure from what I normally do but at the end hopefully I'll bring

it back around and convince you that it's a consistent form of research. So all the work

that I'll be discussing today has been done by this group of people here including my staff

associate Keith Jamieson, my PhD student Xi Jinping who's at ECE Cornell and Manakshi Kholsa who's also

a almost graduated PhD student of Mert Seibunchus who's my other colleague that works in the ECE

department or actually is at Cornell Tech he just moved and in the radiology department my home

department so a great group of people and hopefully I will like the work that we've been doing

recently. So first the funding and disclosure some of this work that I'll present today has been

funded by this inter-campus pilot grant award and then another disclosure is that I'm a scientific

advisory board member at Neuronasal and so let's just dive in. So maybe some of you already know

this but biological neural networks are consistent of these units called neurons so here's a little

schematic of a neuron where you have the cell body and the dendrites and the axon that reaches

out very far and then connects to other regions or other neurons with the axon terminals across

these synapses and so this is a beautiful picture I love these these are called brain bows and they're

ways and they're each of these colors is a neuron and you can kind of see this very complicated

pattern very complex pattern of neurons interacting with each other and in the cortex of the human

brain and so a lot of work has been looked at looking at mapping functions in the human brain

and trying to figure out where in the brain things are represented and so this was actually a

screenshot of a talk from Nancy Kanwisher who's kind of the godmother of brain representations

and vision neuroscientists science and it was it's kind of a really cool way of looking at these

brain regions that have been mapped to specific functions so things like grasping or thinking

about other people's minds looking at how the brain responds to visual stimuli including places

faces color texture bodies and words and so there's a lot of work looking at trying to map these

representations in the brain and figure out how the brain and interacts with its environment

and so a lot of work has been done in the visual system because it's a kind of an easy system to

to probe so you put somebody in a scanner or you put on electrodes on their brain and you try to

measure their responses when they are are shown an image and so the visual areas in the brain

consist of like early visual areas so on the left here you can see it that this is the back of the

brain the occipital cortex and you can see these kind of early visual areas that deal with low

level features and images things like textures or form or motion and they relay these signals to

higher order visual processing areas that then interpret people's either places or faces visual

words other people's thoughts or bodies and these were discovered mostly by viewing images of similar

features or content noticing that the activation in these areas were greater than greater in when

seeing certain images compared to others and of course discovery of these areas is restricted