MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIUM
Speaker: Monica Hurdal
Title: Mathematical and Computational Challenges in
Neuroscience.
Affiliation: Florida State University.
Date: Friday, January 26, 2001.
Place and Time: Room 101 - Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm.
Refreshments: Room 204 - Love Building, 3:00 pm.
Abstract.
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.
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