国際活動支援報告

2018年7月17日（火）

訪問者：Nagoya University　BAGARINAO, EPIFANIO JR

【研修報告】24th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM2018) & BrainConnects2018

《研修報告》
The annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping is a yearly gathering of international researchers involved in mapping the human brain using different neuroimaging modalities. This year’s meeting was held in Singapore from June 17 – 21. With approximately 2,000 presented abstracts, the meeting covered a very good selection of research topics ranging from healthy brain functions to disorders of the nervous system as well as modeling and advances in analysis methods. The keynote lectures covered cutting- edge topics from prominent researchers in the field. I was particularly interested in several lectures concerning recent advances in our understanding of the functional, structural, and topological organization of the human brain and how this knowledge could be leveraged to provide novel mechanistic insights into how brain functions in health and disease emerged. One of the main topics of this meeting is lifespan development, where I had the opportunity to present, during several poster sessions, our recent findings of our ongoing aging cohort study. Specifically, I presented the results from the analysis of our participants’ structural brain images (N = 293) where I extensively examined the structural changes the brain undergoes over the adult lifespan. What is novel in our approach is the use of an unbiased data-driven structural brain parcellation extracted using independent component analysis that allowed the investigation of these changes using clusters that were homogenously changing with age. Moreover, by doing this parcellation, I was also able to examine structural co-variation across the whole brain, the result of which indicated a pattern of regionally specific but spatially interconnected intrinsic brain volume changes with age. Several colleagues and other researchers attending the conference visited our poster and I had the opportunity to have very fruitful discussions with them and was able to explain our findings and promote our research. Many were interested in our results with regards to age-related structural changes, and in our methodology particularly the use of structural co-variation analysis, as well as in our structural-based brain parcellation.
（２）新学術領域研究への貢献
Aging is one of the risk factors of many neurodegenerative disorders. Understanding its effects on the brain could provide deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms of the structural and functional changes the brain undergoes with age and could also help identify several factors critical to the development of dementia as well as its prevention. In this light, our findings could contribute to our growing knowledge of healthy brain aging and could help provide a framework to distinguish the normal aging process from that associated with age-related neurodegenerative diseases.

Nagoya University
Brain and Mind Research Center
BAGARINAO, EPIFANIO JR