On August 4th, 2016, Dr. Xiaoping Hu from University of California Riverside, invited by Prof. Zhang Peng, visited IBP and gave a BEI Shizhang lecture entitled The story of the initial dip in fMRI signal and the dynamics in resting fMRI data.
Dr. Hu obtained his Ph.D. in medical physics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and his post-doctoral training there from 1988-1990. From 1990-2002, he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, where he became a full professor in 1998. From 2002-2016, he was Professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Imaging in the Wallace H. Coulter joint department of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the director of Biomedical Imaging Technology Center in the Emory University School of Medicine.
In July 2016, Dr. Hu moved to UC Riverside to become professor and chair of bioengineering and director of center advanced neuroimaging. Dr. Hu has worked on the development and biomedical application of magnetic resonance imaging for 3 decades. Dr. Hu has authored or co-authored 275 peer-reviewed journal articles. His papers have been cited 20,000+ times (h-index: 77). Dr. Hu was a deputy editor of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine from 2005 to 2013 and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging from 1994 to 2004. He is currently an editor of Brain Connectivity since its inception, an associate editor of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, and an editorial board member of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. He was a member of board of trustees of the international society for magnetic resonance in medicine (2011-2013). He was named a fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in 2004 and a fellow of IEEE and a fellow of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2009.
On the lecture, Prof. Hu highlighted two aspects of his work in the development and application of fMRI. First, he introduced the systematic investigation of the initial dip in fMRI signals, which corresponds to an initial increase in deoxyhemoglobin concentration, demonstrating that it arises mostly from the microvasculature, which is likely closer to the site of neuronal activation. The second part of the talk focused on the dynamic characteristics of the resting state fMRI data, revealing that the resting state activity of the brain can be described by 9 quasi-static states, whose spatiotemporal characteristics provides valuable insights of the resting brain.
The audience posed many interesting questions after the lecture especially about the work on resting state fMRI.