Building a functional brain network starts from defining the network nodes – and as noticed earlier, the node definition is anything but straightforward. The first thing to decide is the scale: shall we use all fMRI measurement voxels as nodes to obtain a maximally large network, or shall we rather clump the voxels together to …
Continue reading Our random brains
In his blog post from last February, Jari Saramäki discussed the importance of creativity in science. If we define creativity as the ability to come up with new ideas and to develop them further, science is all about creativity. Luckily, according to Jari, creativity is like ear for music or eye for design: it can …
Next week, one of the largest annual conferences of network science, NetSci will take place in Burlington, Vermont, USA. NetSci belongs to my favourite conferences: it offers an extensive cross-section of the hot topics from all corners of network science and is also a great opportunity to meet old and new collaborators and friends. For …
I’ve spent the last two weeks in Finland visiting friends and colleagues*. As always, I enjoyed all the meetings and discussions, both planned and spontaneous – and had less time than expected for coding. So, this work lately post will be just a quick update on the status of ROI optimization. * And, the most …
Continue reading A good enough way to define brain network nodes
As one can see from my work lately posts (here and here), a significant part of my day-to-day work consists of programming. Nowadays I’m pretty used to that. However, sometimes I still stop to wonder what has happened. How did somebody like me with no interest to use computer for anything beyond reading email end …
Continue reading How I learned to code (and why everybody else should do the same)
Do you remember my post about optimizing spatial consistency of Regions of Interest (or ROIs), brain areas used as nodes of functional brain networks? There, we clumped similarly-behaving fMRI voxels together using a priority queues. This time, let’s see what’s up with my priority queues. At the same time, we’ll face a core component of …
Nowadays, the Finnish doctoral dissertations are typically article-based. In other words, the main body of the dissertation consists of research articles, typically around four, that have already been published or at least submitted to a journal. To tie these articles together, the dissertation starts with a summary part that describes the main research questions and …
