Translational Neuroimaging Group prepares the AMIE

The Translational Neuroimaging Group has contributed to the Summer School on Imaging in Epilepsy, Epilepsy Surgery, Epilepsy Research and Cognitive Neuroscience, found by Jörg Wellmer, for the last three years. Last year, Theodor was appointed as a board member for the preparation of the next conference year. In 2020, there will be two sister meetings, one of them being the Summer School as we know it (SuSIE), while the other one was geared towards being a scientific meeting (AMIE). The Translational Neuroimaging Group will chair four symposia at the AMIE, which is not the only reason why we highly recommend participation in either meeting. As long as we know it, the SuSIE has been an inspiring, innovative and social meeting. Due to the pandemia, the AMIE & SuSIE had to move to an online format this year, but we are very confident that it will not lose there whatever it had in the last years. We hope to see you there! http://www.imaging-in-epilepsy.org

The Science goes on

The pandemia has forced the Translational Neuroimaging Group into the home office. The only one leaving the house in the morning is Theodor, as he is on clinical service in the neurology department at the moment. As strange as the situation may be, the science continues: Labmeetings are held biweekly on Zoom®, all members of the group have VPN-access to the lab computers and some even said that the groups work more efficiently than normal and it definitely is true that, as a computational neuroscience group, our work is hit less hard be the sequelae of the pandemia. Our thoughts are, thus, with our colleagues who cannot continue their work, and, most of all, by those who are hospitalized due to a COVID-19-infection and by the healthcare workers who take care of them.

Bastian attended this year’s Neurohackademy in Seattle, WA

In August Bastian attended this year’s edition of the Neurohackademy, organized by Ariel Rokem and Tal Yarkoni of the eScience Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The Neurohackademy is a two weeks long hybrid of summer school and hackathon. In the first week, participants attend workshops organized by internationally leading scientists from academia and industry in the field of neuroimaging. Workshops range from topics like Reproducibility over Cloud-based Computing to AI and Neuroethics. In the second week, attendees propose hackathon projects and work on them full-time.

Bastian himself proposed the “deGANerate” tool and developed it together with a group of seven other, international attendees. They utilized cyclic Generative Adversarial Networks, a deep learning technique, to simulate and synthesize atrophic brains out of healthy young ones, in a similar fashion as the well-known FaceApp is able to predict, how one would look like 30 years from now. Apart from all the learning, networking and hacking, there was of course enough time to explore the local brewery scene of Seattle. (Photographs by Jane Koh)