Pedro Valdés-Sosa
Director of the Cuba China Lab for Neurotechnology
co-Director (with Alan Evans) of the Global Brain Consortium
Senior Professor, Cuban Neuroscience Center (CNEURO)
Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, McGill University
Emeritus Academician of the Cuban and Latin American Academies of Sciences
Electrophysiology is an imaging technology with a high temporal resolution that is cost-effective and widely deployable in any economic setting. It is therefore of great interest to global public health. Electrophysiological Source Imaging (ESI) estimates the neural primary current densities that produce the observed EEG/MEG. While ESI is closer to the underlying neural processes of interest, there remain some critical underdeveloped research areas to fully interpret the data.
In this presentation, we facilitate the use of BigBrain project to address some of these issues with the following developments:
Development of workflow to obtain ESI projected to the BigBrain atlas space.
A toolbox, CITFITSTORM that produces BigBrain compatible ESI obtained with a diversity of availability of MRI data to compute the lead yield. These are HCP-compatible MRI collections, Legacy datasets, with only T1, as well as when there is no MRI available.
We have developed methods and a toolbox to integrate external high-dimensional neural mass models with great accuracy and computational efficiency. A main feature of this approach is to allow a general model of disturbed conduction delays between neural masses via a Connectome Tensor formulation.
With this work, we aim to facilitate biophysical models for principled multimodal data fusion in the framework of the BigBrain Project.
Under Dr Valdés-Sosa's leadership, quantitative EEG (qEEG) was extended to sources. The first normative databases for this extension were created in Cuba with the Public Health System. His theoretical contributions span neurophysical models for EEG generation, EEG-fMRI fusion, and studying causal relations in the brain. He has promoted the use of these techniques in many different brain disorders, and he contributes to equity in Science through his professional activities. He has played a leadership role in the Organization of Human Brain Mapping since the late '90s being one of the Fellows of this Organization and now a member of its Scientific Advisory Board. He has advocated the need for total social and regional equity in research and health delivery and the interests of lower and middle-income countries. Of relevance to this conference is Dr Valdés-Sosa's pioneering work on neural mass modeling and EEG inverse solutions, as well as EEG/fMRI fusion which he and his group have channeled into the Workpackage 5 of the HIBALL project.
