Species agnostic tools for translational MRI processing by Dr Eilidh MacNicol

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About the speaker

Eilidh studied neuroscience at the University of Glasgow before coming to study neuroimaging at King’s College London. Her PhD research used MRI to investigate how brain networks change in healthy ageing. During this time, she became interested in extending processing tools developed for human data to be species agnostic, and supporting open science and reproducibility in the preclinical MRI community. In her current role as a postdoctoral researcher, she continues to apply network-based analysis methods to MRI data with the aim of modelling brain changes over time. You can find out more about Eilidh on Twitter and her website.

About the talk

Many tools that prepare neuroimaging data for analysis assume the input data are from adult humans and rely on assumptions that are not appropriate for other populations (e.g., human babies or non-human subjects). Researchers working with these populations make ad hoc adaptions to make their data compatible, but these choices may impact outcomes. These choices diverge workflows based on species, reducing MRI’s translational appeal, and raise concerns for reproducibility between groups. fMRIPrep and MRIQC are standardised workflows for transparent processing of human neuroimaging data. This talk will describe how these tools are being extended to include non-human data and why making our workflows species-agnostic can benefit everyone.

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