Past events: Jyothika Kumar. Multimodal Imaging of the Salience Network in Schizophrenia

What: Multimodal Imaging of the Salience Network in Schizophrenia

Where: BCBL Auditorium

Who: Jyothika Kumar, PhD, Research Fellow, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, Division of Psychiatry and Applied Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

When: 12pm/noon

Growing evidence suggests that the Salience Network, anchored on the bilateral anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex plays a key role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. However, several questions regarding the exact nature of these abnormalities in schizophrenia remain unanswered. I will present data from a multi-modal neuroimaging study where we investigate abnormalities in the functioning, connectivity and neurochemistry of the Salience Network in schizophrenia using task and resting-state fMRI, MEG and MR Spectroscopy. Some of the research questions we were interested in include: 1) how does salient information affect the Salience Network and do patients with schizophrenia process salient information differently? 2) Are there neurochemical abnormalities in the Salience Network in patients with schizophrenia? Do these abnormalities vary between patients with different clinical features? 3) Is there abnormal effective connectivity within the Salience Network in schizophrenia? And is there a relationship between connectivity abnormalities and neurochemical dysfunction in schizophrenia? I will discuss the main findings from this study, some of which are very novel and exciting, and discuss how multi-modal neuroimaging can aid the translational of research findings to clinical practice.