Child Imaging Workshop Great Success

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ucl.ac.uk/cdcn/" target="_self">UCL Centre for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

UCL Neuroscience

The first workshop in the UCL Centre for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience's (CDCN) programme for 2010/11 took place the 1st November 2010.

This workshop, which focused on the challenges involved in obtaining imaging data from the developing brain, was a great success with over 100 people attending from UCL and other neighbouring institutions. A number of expert speakers in this field addressed the issue from several different angles, using data obtained from studies with infants, young children and rodents.

Helen Cross (Neurosciences Unit, UCL Institute of Child Health) used a number of clinical examples to illustrate the importance of imaging in providing evidence of a pathological substrate of epilepsy, and how this, in turn, significantly improved the outcomes for children with epilepsy.

Novel findings of how the reactivation of memories can be decoded using magnetoencephalography were presented by Emrah Duzel (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience).

Clare Elwell (UCL Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering) discussed the use of infrared spectroscopy as an alternative method (easy to administer, non-invasive, no general anesthetics required) of obtaining imaging data from the infant brain.

Mark Lythgoe (UCL Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging) showed how 3D MRI microscopy can be used to investigate the consequences of genotype manipulations on the phenotype in the developing mouse brain.  

The workshop concluded with a talk by Chris Clark (Imaging and Biophysics Unit, UCL Institute of Child Health) who delivered a presentation on the use of quantitative diffusion tensor imaging and tractography to analyse the white matter pathways of the developing brain.