This book was written with the goal of introducing researchers and students in a variety of research fields to the intersection of data science and neuroimaging. This book reflects our own experience of doing research at the intersection of data science and neuroimaging and it is based on our experience working with students and collaborators who come from a variety of backgrounds and have a variety of reasons for wanting to use data science approaches in their work. The tools and ideas that we chose to write about are all tools and ideas that we have used in some way in our own research. Many of them are tools that we use on a daily basis in our work. This was important to us for a few reasons: the first is that we want to teach people things that we ourselves find useful. Second, it allowed us to write the book with a focus on solving specific analysis tasks. For example, in many of the chapters you will see that we walk you through ideas while implementing them in code, and with data. We believe that this is a good way to learn about data analysis, because it provides a connecting thread from scientific questions through the data and its representation to implementing specific answers to these questions. Finally, we find these ideas compelling and fruitful. That’s why we were drawn to them in the first place. We hope that our enthusiasm about the ideas and tools described in this book will be infectious enough to convince the readers of their value.

This lesson describes the principles underlying functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), tractography, and parcellation. These tools and concepts are explained in a broader context of neural connectivity and mental health. 

This tutorial introduces pipelines and methods to compute brain connectomes from fMRI data. With corresponding code and repositories, participants can follow along and learn how to programmatically preprocess, curate, and analyze functional and structural brain data to produce connectivity matrices. 

This lesson delves into the human nervous system and the immense cellular, connectomic, and functional sophistication therein. 

In this lesson, you will hear about some of the open issues in the field of neuroscience, as well as a discussion about whether neuroscience works, and how can we know?