MEG & Brainstorm Workshop @ UQAM (University of Quebec, Montreal)

Organizers: Sylvain Baillet(McGill) & Pierre Jolicoeur (U Montreal)

Motivation:MEG is a brain imaging modality with unique properties: millisecond time resolution and excellent sensitivity to neural signaling. It has become a method of choice to study brain functions and dysfunctions in a growing number (200+; 6 in Canada) of institutions.

• However, a major roadblock to a more rapid penetration of the technique is in a reputation of methodological complexity of the data analysis. Indeed, MEG generates large volumes of data, spanning the entire cortex with a typical rate of 1,000 images per second, with great sensitivity to a broad spectrum of neural signals. The dimensions available to data analysis are now expanding to the study of functional and effective connectivity between brain regions, which necessitates access to additional, complex methods and can be deterrent to new investigators. This workshop and training course intends to demonstrate that 1) MEG is necessary to neuroscientists searching for new activity and connectivity markers of brain functions and dysfunctions and 2) access to MEG and scientific productivity today, are facilitated by a growing community of users in Canada and beyond, and by the open distribution of efficient academic software applications (Baillet et al., 2011).

  About this Workshop & Training Clinic: This session will feature both oral communications from experienced MEG users and a full hands-on software training course. Participants need to bring their own laptops to practice with Brainstorm. The benefit is that they will be able to reproduce the steps taken during the training, when back to their home institution. A Word about Brainstorm: Brainstorm is a software project that is entering its second decade of development and distribution, with an open-source and free-of-charge policy. 4000+ users have downloaded Brainstorm's code or executable packages (which do not require a Matlab license), and 500 registered active users access the software updates on a regular basis. Brainstorm's user community is growing rapidly and features a great variety of research areas in MEG and EEG. We believe Brainstorm is serving well its users, in terms of facility and convenience of utilization and improvements in productivity and reproducibility of their research output. More than 90 journal articles feature results obtained using Brainstorm. The software is now featuring new elements for scripting large batches of data workflows (automated analysis pipelines, group analyses, etc.) and users can plug in their own processes for data analysis. As the user community is growing in size and diversity, we wish to feature some of the most exciting and cutting-edge usage of the software and communicate the essential elements of the application to other researchers Targeted Audience: MEG and EEG users (students, post-docs, Faculty & staff) interested in learning about MEG principles and to experience essential elements of data analysis using a user-friendly software application.

Registration: $25 (http://www.summer12.isc.uqam.ca/page/inscription.php)

• Workshop program: 'July 11th, 9am-6pm

09h00 : Welcome & Introduction (Pierre Jolicoeur, UdeM) 09h15 - 10h00 : Principles of MEG: practical aspects in data collection and experimental set-ups (Elizabeth Bock, McGill) 10h00 - 11h00 : MEG signal extraction and source imaging crash-course: concepts & methodology (Esther Florin, McGill) 11h00 - 11h15 : Coffee break 11h15 - 12h15 :MEG applied to cognitive neuroscience (Pierre Jolicoeur, UdeM) 12h15 -

13h30 : Lunch break

13h30 - 18h00 : Hands-on software training using Brainstorm (Francois Tadel, McGill) (Attendees run the software on their own laptops)

• Data importation (EEG, MEG, MRI)

• Essential pre-processing steps (data review, artifact detection & correction,filtering, epoching, averaging)

• Sensor-based data analysis (sensor clusters, spectra, time-frequency decompositions)

• Source modeling & imaging

• Essential post-processing steps of sensor traces & source images

  • Time-frequency decompositions

  • Spectral analyses

  • Statistics

  • Working with atlases

  • Group studies

  • etc.