Enrico Amico (online): "Towards higher-order analysis of brain networks"

Monday 11 Mar 2024, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

B-30/0-000 - Big meeting room (CRC)

Abstract: The twenty-first century explosion of “big data” has seen the rise of network science as the reference tool to explore complex systems across different applied fields, including medicine, genetics, physics, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience. Over several decades, network models have allowed to disentangle the intricate interacting dynamics taking place in many real-world systems. Among those, the analysis of brain networks has recently risen thanks to the development of new imaging acquisition methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion- weighted imaging (DWI)) as well as new tools from graph theory, opening the field of Network Neuroscience or Brain Connectomics. Examining human brain connectivity data offers new insights on how the integration and segregation of information in the brain relates to human cognition and behavior, and how this organization may be altered in neurological diseases and disorders. However, this exploration so far has been mainly constrained to pairwise interactions, i.e., looking at the brain as a composition of dyads. Beneficial because of its simplicity, this assumption limits the investigation of the complex dynamical processes arising from brain networks in health and disease: neuronal units may interact in larger groups, and such interactions cannot always be decomposed as a linear combination of dyadic couplings. In this talk I will propose ways to overcome this limitation, show preliminary findings of higher-order analysis of brain networks, and discuss the implications and potentials of moving towards the novel field of higher-order brain connectomics. 

Bio: Dr. Enrico Amico is a physicist who graduated from the University Federico II of Naples, Italy. After earning his Master's in 2012, he decided to follow his passion for the scientific study of consciousness. He enrolled in a joint PhD program between the Coma Science Group of Prof. Steven Laureys at University of Liège, and the Marinazzo Lab at the University of Ghent. During his four years there as a PhD student he mainly focused on implementing new methods for brain connectivity assessment across levels of consciousness. In 2016 he joined the CONNplexity Lab (headed by Prof. Joaquín Goñi) at Purdue University as a Postdoctoral researcher, where he made contributions on proposing new network science models for functional and structural brain connectomics. In 2020 he joined EPFL an SNSF Ambizione Fellow, where he was Principal Investigator on different research lines in brain networks and brain connectomics, and where he has co-authored publications in Nature Physics, Nature Communications, Science Advances, NeuroImage, and Network Neuroscience. He is currently Lecturer at Aston University Birmingham, where he leads his lab on advanced models in connectomics.

 

Recording of the presentation

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