About the Levin Lecture Series:
During the Fall and Spring semesters, the Department of Biostatistics holds seminars, called the Levin Lecture Series, on a wide variety of topics which are of interest to both students and faculty. The speakers are occasionally departmental faculty members themselves but very often are invited guests who spend the day of their seminar discussing their research with Biostatistics faculty and students. Lectures are in-person only unless marked otherwise.
Tingting Zhang, PhD
Professor
University of Pittsburgh, Department of Statistics
Analysis of Functional Brain Network Changes from Childhood to Old Age: A Study Using HCP-D, HCP-YA, and HCP-A Datasets
Abstract:
We present a new clustering-enabled regression approach to investigate how functional connectivity (FC) of the entire brain changes from childhood to old age. By applying this method to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data aggregated from three Human Connectome Project studies, we cluster brain regions that undergo identical age-related changes in FC and reveal diverse patterns of these changes for different region clusters. While most brain connections between pairs of regions show minimal yet statistically significant FC changes with age, only a tiny proportion of connections exhibit practically significant age-related changes in FC. Among these connections, FC between region clusters from the same functional network tends to decrease over time, whereas FC between region clusters from different networks demonstrates various patterns of age-related changes. Moreover, our research uncovers sex-specific trends in FC changes. Females show much higher FC mainly within the default mode network, whereas males display higher FC across several more brain networks. These findings underscore the complexity and heterogeneity of FC changes in the brain throughout the lifespan.