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. 

In this lesson, you will learn about the connectome, the collective system of neural pathways in an organism, with a closer look at the neurons, synapses, and connections of particular species. 

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?

The "connectome" is a term, coined in the past decade, that has been used to describe more than one phenomenon in neuroscience. This lecture explains the basics of structural connections at the micro-, meso- and macroscopic scales.

This talk covers the Human Connectome Project, which aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data, and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain.

EyeWire is a game to map the brain. Players are challenged to map branches of a neuron from one side of a cube to the other in a 3D puzzle. Players scroll through the cube and reconstruct neurons with the help of an artificial intelligence algorithm developed at Seung Lab in Princeton University. EyeWire gameplay advances neuroscience by helping researchers discover how neurons connect to process visual information. 

Mozak is a scientific discovery game about neuroscience for citizen scientists and neuroscientists alike. Players to help neuroscientists build models of brain cells and learn more about the brain through their efforts.

This module explains how neurons come together to create the networks that give rise to our thoughts. The totality of our neurons and their connection is called our connectome. Learn how this connectome changes as we learn, and computes information.

This lecture provides an introduction to the study of eye-tracking in humans. 

From the retina to the superior colliculus, the lateral geniculate nucleus into primary visual cortex and beyond, this lecture gives a tour of the mammalian visual system highlighting the Nobel-prize winning discoveries of Hubel & Wiesel.

From Universal Turing Machines to McCulloch-Pitts and Hopfield associative memory networks, this lecture explains what is meant by computation.

In an overview of the structure of the mammalian neocortex, this lecture explains how the mammalian cortex is organized in a hierarchy, describing the columnar principle and canonical microcircuits.

The retina has 60 different types of neurons. What are their functions? This lecture explores the definition of cell types and their functions in the mammalian retina.

Optical imaging offers a look inside the working brain. This lecture takes a look at orientation and ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex, and shows how they can be viewed with calcium imaging.

Functional imaging has led to the discovery of a plethora of visual cortical regions. This lecture introduces functional imaging techniques and their teachings about the visual cortex.

This lecture explains these ideas and explores the task of characterizing neuronal response properties using information theory.

What is color? This lecture explores how color is "made" in the brain and variations of color perception including trichromacy, color blindness in men, tetrachromatic vision in women, and genetic engineering of color perception.