AI/ML-Readiness for Neuroimaging of Language

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Project Summary/Abstract Conceptual or semantic knowledge refers to information about objects, actions, relations, self, culture, and includes meanings of words and phrases. The use of this knowledge is pervasive and automatic in daily life. Everyday activities such as communication, recognition and use of objects, social interactions, and decision making are crucially reliant on conceptual knowledge. Impairment of this complex and widely distributed system has serious consequences for quality of life. Several neurological and psychiatric disorders are associated with the impairment of this system, including stroke with aphasia, dementias, temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia, and autism. Understanding the structure and organization of this system, and the specific ways it is disrupted in these individuals, is critical for developing better treatments and rehabilitation strategies. The goal of this research is to understand the structure and use of this information, its neural basis, and the ways in which it can be impaired by neuropathology. This project pertains to three neuroimaging datasets — two functional MRI and one from stroke survivors — that speak to the neural basis of concepts and language processing in the brain. We aim to transform these data and associated metadata to a “machine learning ready” format and make them easily accessible. This will enable application of powerful modern machine learning techniques, such as Deep Learning, for their analysis. We expect that these analyses will shed new light on the organization and function of this core semantic region in the healthy and impaired brain.