This lesson is a general overview of overarching concepts in neuroinformatics research, with a particular focus on clinical approaches to defining, measuring, studying, diagnosing, and treating various brain disorders. Also described are the complex, multi-level nature of brain disorders and the data associated with them, from genes and individual cells up to cortical microcircuits and whole-brain network dynamics. Given the heterogeneity of brain disorders and their underlying mechanisms, this lesson lays out a case for multiscale neuroscience data integration.

This is the first of two workshops on reproducibility in science, during which participants are introduced to concepts of FAIR and open science. After discussing the definition of and need for FAIR science, participants are walked through tutorials on installing and using Github and Docker, the powerful, open-source tools for versioning and publishing code and software, respectively.

This lesson describes the fundamentals of genomics, from central dogma to design and implementation of GWAS, to the computation, analysis, and interpretation of polygenic risk scores. 

This is a hands-on tutorial on PLINK, the open source whole genome association analysis toolset. The aims of this tutorial are to teach users how to perform basic quality control on genetic datasets, as well as to identify and understand GWAS summary statistics. 

This is a tutorial on using the open-source software PRSice to calculate a set of polygenic risk scores (PRS) for a study sample. Users will also learn how to read PRS into R, visualize distributions, and perform basic association analyses. 

This lesson contains the slides (pptx) of a lecture discussing the necessary concepts and tools for taking into account population stratification and admixture in the context of genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The free-access software Tractor and its advantages in GWAS are also discussed. 

This lesson is an overview of transcriptomics, from fundamental concepts of the central dogma and RNA sequencing at the single-cell level, to how genetic expression underlies diversity in cell phenotypes. 

This is a tutorial introducing participants to the basics of RNA-sequencing data and how to analyze its features using Seurat. 

This tutorial demonstrates how to perform cell-type deconvolution in order to estimate how proportions of cell-types in the brain change in response to various conditions. While these techniques may be useful in addressing a wide range of scientific questions, this tutorial will focus on the cellular changes associated with major depression (MDD). 

This lesson explains the fundamental principles of neuronal communication, such as neuronal spiking, membrane potentials, and cellular excitability, and how these electrophysiological features of the brain may be modelled and simulated digitally. 

This is a continuation of the talk on the cellular mechanisms of neuronal communication, this time at the level of brain microcircuits and associated global signals like those measureable by electroencephalography (EEG). This lecture also discusses EEG biomarkers in mental health disorders, and how those cortical signatures may be simulated digitally.

This is an in-depth guide on EEG signals and their interaction within brain microcircuits. Participants are also shown techniques and software for simulating, analyzing, and visualizing these signals.

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 is a tutorial on designing a Bayesian inference model to map belief trajectories, with emphasis on gaining familiarity with Hierarchical Gaussian Filters (HGFs).

This lesson corresponds to slides 65-90 of the PDF below. 

Similarity Network Fusion (SNF) is a computational method for data integration across various kinds of measurements, aimed at taking advantage of the common as well as complementary information in different data types. This workshop walks participants through running SNF on EEG and genomic data using RStudio.

This tutorial covers the fundamentals of collaborating with Git and GitHub.

This lecture and tutorial focuses on measuring human functional brain networks, as well as how to account for inherent variability within those networks. 

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.