1. Mind Research Network University of New Mexico
ALFF Analysis
Mind Research Network
University of New Mexico
Bryan Galindro

2. Sponsors Dr. Jessica Turner
Associate Professor in Translational Neuroscience
Dr. Vince Calhoun
Professor of Electrical Engineering
Director of the Mind Research Network

3. Project Overview
Develop a general-use software package to run ALFF analysis on resting state fMRI data of schizophrenic subjects
Subjects information will be gathered from various sites

4. Project Overview Software needs to:
Read in subject files from various sites
Perform Analysis
Save results in arbitrary directories
All of the programming will be done in Matlab

5. Schizophrenia 1% of the human population is affected by schizophrenia
Effects of Schizophrenia
Decrease in neural connectivity
Functional disability
Degeneration of gray matter

6. ALFF
Amplitude of
Low
Frequency
Fluctuations

7. ALFF Frequency Range: 0.01Hz – 0.08Hz Low frequency fluctuations are
correlated with functional connectivity
An increase in ALFF reflects an increase in functional connectivity between brain regions

8. rFMRI
Resting Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

9. rFMRI Measures blood flow with respect to neural activity
Neurons fire -> blood flows into region
Measures oxygenated/deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood
Hemoglobin is diamagnetic when oxygenated and paramagnetic when deoxygenated

10. Project Milestones ALFF Analysis (default parameters) Early Psychosis
Low pass filter 0.01Hz to 0.08Hz
Look at reliability of different ALFF measures
Early Psychosis
Before and after antipsychotic medication
Spectroscopy Analysis
Comparing ALFF measures with spectroscopy
MRN Processing Analysis
Run ALFF analysis on subjects with chronic schizophrenia undergoing a change in medication

11. Project Goals
Develop software package that that will allow users to dynamically customize functionality to suit application specific requirements in the neuroscience filed
Automatically include the ALFF into the MRNs centralized system for data management and analysis

12. Size/Scope of team Working with Dr. Turner
After I run the ALFF analysis I will go over the results with Dr. Turner
Will be working with the imaging data analysis team at the MRN

13. Challenges
Finding the correct file types located in large databases over multiple sites
Run various analyses on data from several sites without changing the data or file path

14. Goals for the Month Write Matlab program for early psychosis
Run ALFF analysis on early psychosis data sets

15. Deliverables
Software package that will allow us to run ALFF analysis on fMRI data from several sites and over multiple large scale studies

16. Why is this a good senior design project?
I am using my engineering background to explore different areas of science