Behavioral Neuroscience

(Spring 2021)

Course description

Fig. 2: Brain Image of Subject 3 after ACPC Brain Alignment - Sagittal, Coronal and Axial View 

The course was delivered online in a synchronous modality in which students met twice a week for 1 hour and 15 minutes. The course included traditional lectures and a research experience. The theoretical part included introductory notions of brain anatomy and physiology, introduction to brain imaging and MRI and fMRI analysis. The practical experience included course-based research activities according to the LTU CRE pedagogical model (https://www.inclusivity-cre.org/) experienced through the Brainlife platform (https://brainlife.io/).

 

Students

6 students participated in the experience. None of the students had any previous experience with Brainlife and very limited knowledge of brain anatomy and functions.

Summary of the Activities

 All CRE activities were conducted in Brainlife and the results of the assignments were stored within the platform. The experience was divided into two parts (1) Tutorials and (2) Group Analysis Through Pipeline Creation. Most of the CRE assignments required the students to run applications on BrainLife and to present the results within a week. The CRE activities were integrated in the course and spanned for the entire 16 weeks of duration of the course. All CRE activities were conducted in Brainlife and the results of the assignments were stored within the platform. The experience was divided into two parts (1) Tutorials and (2) Group Analysis Through Pipeline Creation. 

Part One - Tutorials

Tutorials provided within the Brainlife platform allowed the students to familiarize themselves with the varying apps and processes offered by BrainLife. Students spent time working individually on the following tutorials:

  1. Introduction: Walked students through account and project creation, interacting with datasets, launching processes, visualizing results, and creating pipelines

  2. Anatomy: Showed students how to process anatomical data for further data analysis (ie. volumetric analysis)

  3. FMRI Preprocessing: Allowed students to successfully process functional data for further data analysis 

  4. FMRI Networks: Showed students how to generate functional connectivity matrices following fMRI preprocessing.

Part Two - Group Analysis Through Pipeline Creation 

Using pipelines, which allowed for the combination of application and processes (in the form of rules), students applied this technique to multiple subjects at a time. The students worked individually and as a group to create multiple pipelines with the use of the apps on the right.



Figure 11: Self-reported perception of the experience with CRE-Brainlife 

Figure 12: Self Reported Student Experience Word Cloud 

Results

6 students (4 female; 2 males) with no previous experience either in neuroscience analysis and Brainlife completed a 16-weeks course-based research experience in which they measured, visualized and compared brain anatomy and functions.

As indicated by the self-reported perception of their experience, students liked working with Brainlife at processing anatomical and functional MRI data (Figure 1). 

A word cloud analysis (Figure 2) shows that the most used adjective to define their experience was “interesting”. More in general we can see a polarization between positive adjectives like “stimulating”,  “educational”, “interactive”, “engaging”,  “simple”, “helpful” and negative adjectives, like “frustrating”, “complicated”, “challenging”, “confusing”. The word choices also included adjectives like “new” and “different”, indicating  that students felt they had done something original, something they had not experienced before in their path to graduation.