​​​Talk from Laura Harsan – Université de Strasbourg, Integrative Multimodal Imaging in Healthcare Team
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Short abstract:
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Maladaptive changes in specific neuromodulatory systems and neural circuits can lead to manifestation of several prominent brain disorders, including anxiety, depression or other pathologies involving cognitive/memory impairments. Resting State Brain Networks mapping and diffusion MRI and tractography in rodent models are increasingly used to capture such circuitry based underpinnings of pathological traits. This talk will focus on the methodological aspects of preclinical connectome studies and will discuss the challenges related with anaesthesia, strain and phenotypic variability into the data.
We will comparatively present findings from longitudinal mapping of functional and structural brain pathways in rodent models of alcohol addiction, and disorders associated to cognitive impairments. We will exemplify neuromodulatory approaches using optogenetics to create the depression phenotype in mice, and capture with fMRI the brain response and circuitry remodeling. Seed based analysis and graph theory approaches are used to identify the functional circuitry signatures underlying the behavior phenotypes. Dynamic resting-state functional connectivity (DFC) analyses using a sliding-window methods complement the analytic approach.