Visitors Talk: Jean-Baptiste Poline, McGill University

Abstract

In this presentation, I will review some of the challenges that neuroscience and neuroimaging are facing, and in particular, the challenges of reproducible and generalizable studies in the context of data distributed and under variable legal and ethical constraints. The field of neuroscience is facing new questions on the impact of variable processing and the difficulty of generalizing results. These challenges have both technical and sociological roots, and the solutions will likely also be both technological and sociological. I will provide examples of neuroinformatics projects developed in my laboratory or in collaboration to transform how we share and analyze data, with a specific example being the development of imaging biomarkers for Parkinson’s Disease. I will show preliminary results showing that distributed infrastructures can be leveraged for federated learning. I will open the discussion on some key aspects to consider, for instance, how these infrastructures can be maintained, how their governance structure should be thought out, and how this offers opportunities to build a community of practices.

About the speaker

Jean-Baptiste (JB) Poline, is a tenured Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, and at the School of Computer Science at McGill; the Director of the ORIGAMI neuro-data-science laboratory where the Neurobagel and Nipoppy projects are developed. He is a strong proponent of open and reproducible science, founded or co-founded two scientific journals, works with several groups on training (ReproNim, Neurohackademy, etc) or standardization (GA4GH, INCF) initiatives, chaired the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility scientific council, Chaired the NeuroHub and Technical Steering Committee for the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform at the Neuro. Among the early pioneers of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), today, Prof. Jean-Baptiste Poline is a leading researcher in the fields of neuroimaging, imaging genetics, data science and neuroinformatics technologies and works with several initiative worldwide to develop open, reproducible, and efficient neuroimaging research.