The Center for Brain and Health (CBH) was delighted to host a seminar with the guest speaker Professor Alessio Fracasso – Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, which took place on Thursday, March 28, 2024, at 1 PM (GST) in C1-120.

Abstract

Modern approaches to individualized medicine aim at tailoring treatment towards a single patient (or group of patients, in case of personalized medicine), considering a person’s unique nature from a biological, physiological, and anatomical perspective.

From an economic and societal perspective, modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners are a technological development that put into practice the concept of individualized medicine, facilitating non-invasive imaging of the whole brain at an unprecedented level of detail.

In this talk I am going to discuss recent approaches to translate basic imaging evidence into individualized and quantifiable outcomes. I will leverage the concept of life-span trajectories to disambiguate pre-clinical and clinical groups known to be inherently heterogeneous in nature.

These approaches come with important challenges, especially from an analysis and quantification perspective. Standard software and pipelines are not yet suited for processing recent MRI data. However, dedicated tools exist, taking advantage of the rich information present in modern high-field imaging data. These analytical strategies are implemented with the individual participant in mind, characterizing functional and structural idiosyncrasies that would otherwise be lost in the averaging process.

I will provide examples and argue how these approaches will become fundamental in the near future, representing an important paradigm shift in the imaging field.

Bio

Alessio Fracasso has completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Trento (Italy). After his PhD he has gained extensive experience on functional, structural MRI and computational modeling (e.g. population receptive field model, pRF), at 7Tesla and 3Tesla in Utrecht, The Netherlands (Utrecht University, Utrecht Medical Hospital) and Amsterdam (Spinoza Centre). In 2018 he moved to Glasgow, Scotland, and joined the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, where he continues his work on sensory-motor research and the neuroanatomical bases of clinical conditions.

Alessio is interested in the link between sensory stimulation, action, and perception. His goal is to understand the neurophysiology of the sensory-motor and visual systems using psychophysics and imaging methods (MRI-fMRI, 7Tesla/3Tesla). Besides fundamental sensory-motor questions, he applies the knowledge of the functioning visual system to ophthalmological and neurological manifestations. he has worked on a range of topics including schizophrenia, clinical applications, plasticity, retinotopic organization and neuroanatomy using computational, behavioural and neuroimaging methods.