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Speaker: Helena Balabin (left)
Paper: White matter tract correlations with spoken language in cerebrovascular disease
Learning Objectives:
Evaluate both the potential and limits of speech-based biomarkers for the detection of cerebrovascular disease, in particular with regards to linking speech measures to the underlying neurological basis
Learn about the methodological considerations in linking speech- and brain-based measures
Discuss possible reasons for a missing significant correlation between speech features and measures derived from white matter hyperintensity volumes
About the Speaker: Helena Balabin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medical Image Processing and Machine Learning Laboratory (MIPLab) at the University of Calgary. Previously, she was an interdisciplinary PhD student and Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) fellow at the departments of Neurosciences and Computer Science at KU Leuven in Belgium, and a visiting student at the University of Alberta & the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) in Edmonton, with work spanning clinical AI for dementia detection from speech, the neural mechanisms of compositional language processing, and representational alignment between AI models and human neural data.
Speaker: Meike Boerstra (right)
Talk Description: White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are a common imaging feature of cerebral small vessel disease and are associated with cognitive impairment. However, WMH burden does not always correspond closely with cognitive functioning: some individuals show cognitive impairment despite relatively mild WMH, whereas others maintain relatively preserved cognition despite severe WMH. Zeng et al. (2024) investigated whether differences in dynamic resting-state functional network connectivity may help characterize these WMH–cognition mismatches. The study examined patterns of connectivity across large-scale brain networks, their relationship with executive functioning and information processing speed, and additional markers of cerebral small vessel disease.
About the Speaker: Meike Boerstra is a first year MSc student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Calgary, supervised by Dr. Brandy Callahan. Her research interests lie at the intersection of clinical neuropsychology, cognitive aging, and neuroimaging. Her current proposed research will use resting-state functional MRI to investigate relationships between brain function and cognition in older adults with and without ADHD.