Monica K. Hurdal
Florida State University, U.S.A. and Queensland University of Technology,
Australia
The human brain is a highly convoluted surface with many folds and fissures. This surface is known as the grey matter and is where functional processing of the brain occurs. Many areas of research involving the human brain are concerned with identifying regions and fissures that are responsible for a particular functional task, such as vision or motion, or regions which are affected by diseases, such as Alzheimers or schizophrenia. In this seminar, I'll discuss some of the mathematical models I have used to help identify and visualize regions of brain activity. I'll present results that localize activity in the visual cortex from EEG (brain wave) data and show how scientific visualization was used for enhancing the models and identifying trends in the data that were not apparent without the model enhancements. I'll also discuss methods for unfolding and flattening the surface of the cortex to create flat maps of the brain which can be used to visualize and localize data from PET and fMRI scans.