Using brain imaging to pierce the mystery of human behavior

© Alban Kakulya / 2020 EPFL - In the Medical Image Processing Lab, Dimitri Van De Ville and Thomas Bolton have studied the impact that computational imaging has on cognitive and clinical neuroscience by reviewing more than one hundred articles. How are human behavior and brain activity linked? That question has been eating away at Thomas Bolton ever since he started his PhD. To try and find the answer, he has reviewed and summarized the most recent scientific studies into how the data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - a technique for monitoring the activity of the entire brain over time - are analyzed. In addition to the lessons learned from his thesis, the PhD student was able to draw on the clinical and technical know-how of his colleagues Elenor Morgenroth and Maria Giulia Preti. "Our aim was to see where things stand now and suggest avenues for future research," says Bolton. "We wanted to pierce the mystery that shrouds cutting-edge analytical techniques and show how they characterize the various aspects of human behavior." The resulting article has been published in  Trends in Neurosciences . Bridging the gap between science and users  Bolton, together with Professor Dimitri Van De Ville, reviewed the most recent literature on brain imaging and came up with an original, consensus-based summary for the neuroscience community.