Biomedical imaging research opportunities workshop IV: A white paper

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134967/1/mp5838.pd

The promise and the promises: partnerships from a university perspective

The writers, two faculty members, discuss issues related to the initiation of a partnership between the School of Education at Oregon State University and two middle schools. The partnership, known as the Professional Development School, was created in order connect those responsible for the education of children. The partnership was found to be beneficial in that professional collaboration was developed between the university and public school faculties. Tensions that occurred involved conflicts with the university\u27s reward system, the length of time to build trust, difficulties in establishing collaborative research agendas and balancing two worlds, and feelings of isolation from university colleagues and activities. There have been assurances that the university\u27s reward system will change to give priority to work in schools, but this remains to be a great concern for nontenured staff. Despite this, these partnerships have great potential for influencing change in teacher education

Neuromagnetic evidence for a featural distinction of English consonants: Sensor- and source-space data

Speech sounds can be classified on the basis of their underlying articulators or on the basis of the acoustic characteristics resulting from particular articulatory positions. Research in speech perception suggests that distinctive features are based on both articulatory and acoustic information. In recent years, neuroelectric and neuromagnetic investigations provided evidence for the brain’s early sensitivity to distinctive features and their acoustic consequences, particularly for place of articulation distinctions. Here, we compare English consonants in a Mismatch Field design across two broad and distinct places of articulation – labial and coronal – and provide further evidence that early evoked auditory responses are sensitive to these features. We further add to the findings of asymmetric consonant processing, although we do not find support for coronal underspecification. Labial glides (Experiment 1) and fricatives (Experiment 2) elicited larger Mismatch responses than their coronal counterparts. Interestingly, their M100 dipoles differed along the anterior/posterior dimension in the auditory cortex that has previously been found to spatially reflect place of articulation differences. Our results are discussed with respect to acoustic and articulatory bases of featural speech sound classifications and with respect to a model that maps distinctive phonetic features onto long-term representations of speech sounds

Segmentation of the brain from 3D MRI using a hierarchical active surface template

The accurate segmentation of the brain from three-dimensional medical imagery is important as the basis for visualization, morphometry, surgical planning and intraoperative navigation. The complex and variable nature of brain anatomy makes recognition of the brain boundaries a difficult problem and frustrates segmentation schemes based solely on local image features. We have developed a deformable surface model of the brain as a mechanism for utilizing a priori anatomical knowledge in the segmentation process. The active surface template uses an energy minimization scheme to find a globally consistent surface configuration given a set of potentially ambiguous image features. Solution of the entire 3D problem at once produces superior results to those achieved using a slice by slice approach. We have achieved good results with MR image volumes of both normal and abnormal subjects. Evaluation of the segmentation results has been performed using cadaver studies. 1. INTRODUCTION The rapi..