Department of Mathematics Colloquium
Florida State University
January 26, 2001

Mathematical and Computational Challenges in Neuroscience

Monica K. Hurdal, Department of Mathematics, Florida State University

As with many areas in biology, there is now becoming a great wealth of data available in neuroscience and from human brain. "Neuroinformatics" is the new term used to encompass any combination of neuroscientific data and computational tools needed to understand this data. There are many challenges and opportunities for mathematics to assist in processing and modeling this data. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans have inhomogeneities which need to be removed; undesired regions such as the skull need to be removed from the scans; the scans need to be parcellated into anatomical regions; functional activation data needs to be analyzed; new models for visualizing and understanding this data need to be developed. This presentation will discuss some of these challenges and will conclude with some recent results that I have produced using circle packing software to produce quasi-conformal cortical flat maps of the human brain.


Updated January 2001.
Copyright 2001 by Monica K. Hurdal. All rights reserved.