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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay
@benjaminkay.bsky.social
180 followers 210 following 33 posts
Neuroscientist, statistician, programmer, and dad in St. Louis, Missouri
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 1d
Check out some compelling and timely work by @nasiametoki.bsky.social on sex vs gender differences in the developing adolescent brain!
nasiametoki.bsky.social
nasiametoki.bsky.social @nasiametoki.bsky.social · 1d
Is resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC), cortical thickness (CT), or cortical volume more effective at capturing sex and gender differences in the brains of preadolescents?

Check out our new article (doi.org/10.1016/j.dc...) now out in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 8d
Our methods are detailed in Nature Communications, and Matlab code for computing motion impact score is available on GitHub. Try it on your favorite brain-behavior association and let us know what you find!
doi.org/10.1038/s414...
github.com/DosenbachGre...
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 8d
The good news is that frame censoring does a fantastic job of reducing motion overestimation scores. That means if you motion censor your data after standard processing then you are much less likely to get spurious results due to motion.
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 8d
Over 40% of brain-behavior effects were likely overestimated due to motion. There was no correlation between a trait’s a priori correlation with motion and its motion overestimation score. Calculating the motion impact score was necessary to discover the problematic brain-behavior effects!
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 8d
The principle behind the motion impact score is simple! We know head motion varies from second-to-second while behavioral traits are stable over time. We just compare high- and low-motion portions of the fMRI scans. The effect of behavior is the same and cancels out, leaving the motion impact.
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 8d
We realized that seemingly-unrelated behavioral traits like matrix reasoning ability are, surprisingly, correlated with in-scanner head motion. Could brain-behavior associations of more motion-correlated traits be more impacted by residual head motion? We developed a tool to find out!
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 8d
Unfortunately, even with fancy processing pipelines and motion censoring, the effect size of residual head motion on functional connectivity can still be larger than the effect of many behavioral traits.
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · 8d
Ever wondered if your interesting brain-behavior correlation was over- or under-estimated due to head motion, but were afraid to ask? We’ve created a motion impact score for detecting spurious brain-behavior associations, now available in Nature Communications!
doi.org/10.1038/s414...
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Reposted by Benjamin Kay
thetransmitter.bsky.social
The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Jul 31
Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into large neuroimaging datasets, new study of ABCD data shows.

By Natalia Mesa

www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/poo...
Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into MRI data
Analyses that include low-quality MRI data underestimate cortical thickness and overestimate surface area, according to new work from the ABCD Study.
www.thetransmitter.org
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · Jul 17
Excited to see the latest paper from @bttyeo.bsky.social's lab finally published in Nature! Now I know the most economical way to spend my grant money on MRI! No surprise, sample size matters, but adequate sampling in scan time can reduce the cost of sampling adequate numbers of participants.
bttyeo.bsky.social
Thomas Yeo @bttyeo.bsky.social · Jul 17
1/11 Excited to share our @Naturestudy led by @leonooi.bsky.social @csabaorban.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social

AI performance is known to scale with logarithm of sample size (Kaplan 2020), but in many domains, sample size can be # participants or # measurements...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · Jul 11
Once again, if you give @gordonneuro.bsky.social et al a network, they're going to want to characterize its subnetworks... A thought provoking read on the AMN (née CON) and the brain architecture of the decision-action-feedback loop. I always feel smarter after reading these kinds of papers!
Illustration from the book "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie"
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · Jun 26
Fantastic work from @drdamienfair.bsky.social's using the latest in precision neuroimaging and neuromodulation to untangle the mechanisms of chronic pain!
drdamienfair.bsky.social
Damien Fair @drdamienfair.bsky.social · Jun 26
Alert!!!!

“An Action Networks Model for Pain”

We propose a new model for chronic pain — and highlight two functionally connected cortical networks that could revolutionize how we treat it.

👉 thread below 🧵

osf.io/preprints/ps...
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 28
That's an intriguing question! We analyzed data from the ABCD n-back task as if it were rest and found essentially the same stimulant-related differences in FC as we did for "pure" rest, see Supplemental Figure 4.
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 24
Touché... although I've never once had a program officer tell me that I've been publishing too much 😅
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 24
I appreciate your offer of help! We're always looking for ways to extract the most quality out of our precision studies, so I may need to take you up on that at some point!
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 24
This is not meant to be directed at @ckorponay.bsky.social, but I take issue with reviewers in general asking for large data sets to be reprocessed using their favorite pipeline without strong theoretical justification. Reprocessing 40,000+ scans takes a lot of taxpayer $$$!
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 24
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that our stimulant-related differences in FC are due entirely to decreased sLFO inflation in children taking stimulants. If sLFO inflation is driven by diminishing arousal, this would still support our central hypothesis that stimulants increase arousal.
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 24
Snark aside, we've appreciated non-stationarity of fMRI BOLD going back to the early days of Friston and Volterra kernels. Every denoising pipeline has grappled with this to some extent, and I'm excited to see the insights from @ckorponay.bsky.social's RIPTiDe get incorporated into future pipelines.
Redirecting
doi.org
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 24
We're confident stimulants modulate arousal, but how much of what we see is "pure" neuronal signal and how much is filtered through physiology is an open question for all fMRI studies. It's terrific having tools like RIPTiDe, and your paper raises awareness about collecting physiological covariates!
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 24
Yes, loved the fresh perspective of your Nat Hum Behav article, more and more we're realizing how much arousal and associated physiological changes affect rs-fMRI. I'm sure you know Ryan Raut's work doi.org/10.1126/scia... and Catie Chang's recent Nat Neurosci paper doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Global waves synchronize the brain’s functional systems with fluctuating arousal
Traveling waves spatiotemporally organize brain-wide activity in synchrony with ongoing arousal fluctuations.
doi.org
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Reposted by Benjamin Kay
meharpist.bsky.social
Mary Elizabeth Sutherland @meharpist.bsky.social · May 23
It's not surprising to see that cutting off funding disrupts science and impacts its novelty, but I think it's important that this is documented and shared 🧪 . For more see the news coverage in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Renewal of NIH grants linked to more innovative results, study finds
Survey of hundreds of scientists’ work suggests that cutting off funding disrupts focus and reduces the novelty of research.
www.nature.com
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 23
That's a really interesting hypothesis! We think norepinephrine drives the arousal boost and dopamine drives the salience boost. Whether high levels of dopamine cause psychosis through the salience network or through other brain targets is an open question, see Winton-Brown: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 23
This is the point of our story: the biggest differences in connectivity are in arousal and salience networks (to which PMN is closely yoked). Contrary to what people expect, the differences in "top down" attention networks are relatively smaller (FPN) or basically not existent (DAN).
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 23
You are reading those matrices correctly! The decreased within-network FC in primary systems is what we see in subjects who are more alert/better rested. The between-network differences are significant for SAL and PMN. There may be a trend for DMN and FPN, but it didn't reach significance.
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benjaminkay.bsky.social
Benjamin Kay @benjaminkay.bsky.social · May 23
You're right, the link between amphetamines and sleep dates back to Gordon Alles 1927. The link with salience goes back to at least Robbins (Nature) 1976. That hasn't stopped claims that MPH acts directly on attention. Our study shows the greatest effects are on arousal and salience, not attention.
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