Dimitri Van De Ville

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne | EPFL · Institute of Bioengineering

Identifying relationships between structural and functional networks is crucial for understanding the large-scale organization of the human brain. The potential contribution of emerging techniques like functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the structure–functional relationship has yet to be explored. In our study, using simultaneous...

Preamble - Having recently transitioned from academia, I am sharing below the research plan of my latest grant application, developed in collaboration with Prof. Dimitri Van De Ville (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Prof. Serge Vulliémoz (University of Geneva), Prof. Giovanni Petri (Northeastern University London), and Prof. Manish Sagga...

The balance between neural excitation and inhibition (EIB) is an essential mechanism underlying cognitive processes. Yet, little is understood about how EIB shifts with cognitive load and its impact on functional connectivity dynamics. We investigate temporal profiles of the reciprocal modulation between EIB and functional network dynamics during w...

Hemispheric asymmetry is a universal property of brain organization with wide implications into brain function and structure, and diseases. This study presents a laterality index for characterizing hemispheric asymmetries that underlie cortical maps using geometric eigenmodes derived from human cortical surfaces. We develop a generalized design to...

Premature birth affects brain maturation, illustrated by altered brain functional connectivity at term equivalent age (TEA) and alters neurobehavioral outcome. To correct early developmental differences and improve neurological outcome, music during the NICU stay has been proposed as an auditory enrichment with modulatory effects on functional and...

Understanding the interplay between human brain structure and function is crucial to discern neural dynamics. This study explores the relation between brain structure and macroscale functional activity using subject-specific structural connectome eigenmodes, complementing prior work that focused on group-level models and geometry. Leveraging data f...

Resting-state fMRI has spurred an impressive amount of methods development, among which dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) is one important branch. However, the relevance of time-varying and time-resolved features has led to debate, to which we want to bring in our viewpoint. We argue that, while statistically many dFC features extracted from re...

Human communication entails an efficient way of simultaneously processing voice and reducing the impact of environmental noise. By manipulating background noise, we aimed at clarifying the neural mechanisms allowing voice comprehension in noisy situations. Our results point to spatial and temporal coexistence of lateral and medial temporal cortex n...

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) may lead to lower levels of psychological distress, including depression, anxiety, and stress in adolescents. Past research has advanced the discovery of neural architecture recruited by MBI. However, the brain mechanisms through which mindfulness Keywords Brain networks; mindfulness; dynamic functional connect...

Functional connectivity patterns in the human brain, like the friction ridges of a fingerprint, can uniquely identify individuals. Does this “brain fingerprint” remain distinct even during Alzheimer’s disease (AD)? Using fMRI data from healthy and pathologically ageing subjects, we find that individual functional connectivity profiles remain unique...

Hallucinations can occur in the healthy population, are clinically relevant and frequent symptoms in many neuropsychiatric conditions, and have been shown to mark disease progression in patients with neurodegenerative disorders where antipsychotic treatment remains challenging. Here, we combine MR-robotics capable of inducing a clinically-relevant...

Somatotopy, the topographical arrangement of sensorimotor pathways corresponding to distinct body parts, is a fundamental feature of the human central nervous system (CNS). Traditionally, investigations into brain and spinal cord somatotopy have been conducted independently, primarily utilizing body stimulations or movements. To date, however, no s...

In the past decade, exploration of spontaneous blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations has expanded beyond the brain to include the spinal cord. While most studies have predominantly focused on the cervical region, the lumbosacral segments play a crucial role in motor control and sensory processing of the lower limbs. Addressing thi...

Objectives: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a highly heritable disorder characterized by emotion dysregulation and recurrent oscillations between mood states. Despite the proven efficacy of early interventions, vulnerability markers in high-risk individuals are still lacking. BD patients present structural alterations of the hippocampus, a pivotal hub of...

Music is ubiquitous, both in its instrumental and vocal forms. While speech perception at birth has been at the core of an extensive corpus of research, the origins of the ability to discriminate instrumental or vocal melodies is still not well investigated. In previous studies comparing vocal and musical perception, the vocal stimuli were mainly r...

Background Negative symptoms of schizophrenia lack effective treatments. Anomalies in the reward system and cerebellum have been linked to negative symptom The cerebellum modulates reward circuitry via the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The "cognitive dysmetria theory" posits that reduced cerebellar inhibition in schizophrenia may underlie striatal...

The awake mammalian brain is functionally organized in terms of large-scale distributed networks that are constantly interacting. Loss of consciousness might disrupt this temporal organization leaving patients unresponsive. We hypothesize that characterizing brain activity in terms of transient events may provide a signature of consciousness. For t...

Psychotic symptoms are among the most debilitating and challenging presentations of severe psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective, and bipolar disorder. A pathophysiological understanding of intrinsic brain activity underlying psychosis is crucial to improve diagnosis and treatment. While a potential continuum along the psycho...

Connectomes' topological organization can be quantified using graph theory. Here, we investigated brain networks in higher dimensional spaces defined by up to ten graph-theoretic nodal properties. These properties assign a score to nodes, reflecting their meaning in the network. Using 100 healthy unrelated subjects from the Human Connectome Project...

Advanced age is the most important risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and carrier-status of the Apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) allele is the strongest known genetic risk factor. Many studies have consistently shown a link between APOE4 and synaptic dysfunction, possibly reflecting pathologically accelerated biological aging in persons at risk for...

Aim Adolescents born very preterm (VPT; <32 weeks of gestation) face an elevated risk of executive, behavioral, and socioemotional difficulties. Evidence suggests beneficial effects of mindfulness‐based intervention (MBI) on these abilities. This study seeks to investigate the association between the effects of MBI on executive, behavioral, and soc...

Clinical research emphasizes the implementation of rigorous and reproducible study designs that rely on between-group matching or controlling for sources of biological variation such as subject’s sex and age. However, corrections for body size (i.e. height and weight) are mostly lacking in clinical neuroimaging designs. This study investigates the...

Identifying relationships between structural and functional networks is crucial for understanding the large-scale organization of the human brain. The potential contribution of emerging techniques like functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the structure-functional relationship has yet to be explored. In our study, we characterize glo...

Eigenmodes can be derived from various structural brain properties, including cortical surface geometry ¹ and interareal axonal connections comprising an organism’s connectome ² . Pang and colleagues map geometric and connectome eigenmodes to spatial patterns of human brain activity, assessing whether brain connectivity or geometry provide greater...

BACKGROUND Cortical excitation/inhibition dynamics have been suggested as a key mechanism occurring after stroke. Their supportive or maladaptive role in the course of recovery is still not completely understood. Here, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)-electroencephalography coupling to study cortical reactivity and intracortical GABA...

Somatotopy, the topographical arrangement of sensorimotor pathways corresponding to distinct body parts, is a fundamental feature of the human central nervous system (CNS). Traditionally, investigations into brain and spinal cord somatotopy have been conducted independently, primarily utilizing body stimulations or movements. To date, however, no s...

The temporal variability of the thalamus in functional networks may provide valuable insights into the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. To address the complexity of the role of the thalamic nuclei in psychosis, we introduced micro‐co‐activation patterns (μCAPs) and employed this method on the human genetic model of schizophrenia 22q11.2 deletion s...

This study discerns the relationship between discrete emotions and their underlying components from a detailed dataset of continuous annotations of more than 50 emotion variables during short films. Appraisal theories predict that discrete emotions arise from a combination of components. Specifically, the Component Process Model (CPM) highlights th...

The extensive Emo-FilM dataset stands for Emotion research using Films and fMRI in healthy participants. This dataset includes detailed emotion annotations by 44 raters for 14 short films with a combined duration of over 2 1/2 hours, as well as recordings of respiration, heart rate, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from a different...

Background Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the current standard treatment for chronic severe tinnitus; however, preliminary evidence suggests that real-time functional MRI (fMRI) neurofeedback therapy may be more effective. Purpose To compare the efficacy of real-time fMRI neurofeedback against CBT for reducing chronic tinnitus distress. Mate...

Patients with drug-resistant essential tremor (ET) may undergo Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgical thalamotomy (SRS-T), where the ventro-intermediate nucleus of the thalamus (Vim) is lesioned by focused beams of gamma radiations to induce clinical improvement. Here, we studied SRS-T impacts on left Vim dynamic functional connectivity (dFC, n = 2...

This oral presentation at ABIM2024 won the second place for the best presentation

This study aimed to assess the time-on-task effect on load-related cortical activity using functional near infrared spectroscopy. Thirty-six healthy adults completed Stroop and n-back tasks with three cognitive loads across three runs. Findings revealed a time-on-task effect, marked by higher subjective mental fatigue, as well as a strategic shift,...

Background Patients with idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (p‐iNPH) present with balance impairment, which contribute to falls and could improve after cerebrospinal fluid shunting procedure. Structural brain correlates of balance in iNPH have not been investigated yet. Moreover, as gait, balance changes after shunting could be affected by Al...

The spinal cord is a critical component of the central nervous system, transmitting and integrating signals between the brain and the periphery via topographically organized functional levels. Despite its central role in sensorimotor processes and several neuromotor disorders, mapping the functional organization of the spinal cord in vivo in humans...

In the past decade, exploration of spontaneous blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations has expanded beyond the brain to include the spinal cord. While most studies have predominantly focused on the cervical region, the lumbosacral segments play a crucial role in motor control and sensory processing of the lower limbs. Addressing thi...

Brain communication, defined as information transmission through white-matter connections, is at the foundation of the brain’s computational capacities that subtend almost all aspects of behavior: from sensory perception shared across mammalian species, to complex cognitive functions in humans. How did communication strategies in macroscale brain n...

Functional connectivity (FC) between brain regions as manifested via fMRI entails signatures that can be used to identify individuals and decode cognitive tasks. In this work, we use methods from graph structure inference to estimate FC, which is in contrast to the conventional approach of deriving FC via correlation. Furthermore, instead of workin...

Functional brain fingerprinting has emerged as an influential tool to quantify reliability in neuroimaging studies and to identify cognitive biomarkers in both healthy and clinical populations. Recent studies have revealed that brain fingerprints reside in the timescale-specific functional connectivity of particular brain regions. However, the impa...

Learning to play an instrument at an advanced age may help to counteract or slow down age-related cognitive decline. However, studies investigating the neural underpinnings of these effects are still scarce. One way to investigate the effects of brain plasticity is using resting-state functional connectivity (FC). The current study compared the eff...

Film fMRI has gained tremendous popularity in many areas of neuroscience. However, affective neuroscience remains somewhat behind in embracing this approach, even though films lend themselves to study how brain function gives rise to complex, dynamic, and multivariate emotions. Here, we discuss the unique capabilities of film fMRI for emotion resea...

The awake mammalian brain is functionally organized in terms of large-scale distributed networks that are constantly interacting. Loss of consciousness might disrupt this temporal organization leaving patients unresponsive. We hypothesized that characterizing brain activity in terms of transient events may provide a signature of consciousness. For...

Treatment-resistant depression is a severe form of major depressive disorder and deep brain stimulation is currently an investigational treatment. The stimulation’s therapeutic effect may be explained through the functional and structural connectivities between the stimulated area and other brain regions, or to depression-associated networks. In th...

Deconvolution of the hemodynamic response is an important step to access short timescales of brain activity recorded by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Albeit conventional deconvolution algorithms have been around for a long time (e.g., Wiener deconvolution), recent state-of-the-art methods based on sparsity-pursuing regularization ar...

Introduction 3D visualization of cerebral arteries allows better detection and analysis of neurovascular diseases. While deep learning (DL) models enable automatic segmentation of cerebral arteries on CT, MRI and 3DRA independently, they have mostly been developed to process one imaging modality. This may limit the reproducibility and comparability...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a valuable tool for studying subcutaneous implants in rodents, providing non-invasive insight into biomaterial conformability and longitudinal characterization. However, considerable variability in existing image analysis techniques, manual segmentation and labeling, as well as the lack of reference atlases as op...

Alterations of the limbic system may be present in the chronic phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our aim was to study the long-term impact of this disease on limbic system-related behaviour and its associated brain functional connectivity, according to the severity of respiratory symptoms in the acute phase. To this end, we investigated the multimodal...

The Bio Image and Signal Processing (BISP) Technical Committee (TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) promotes activities within the broad technical field of biomedical image and signal processing. Areas of interest include medical and biological imaging, digital pathology, molecular imaging, microscopy, and associated computational imagi...

The temporal variability of the thalamus in functional networks may provide valuable insights into the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. To address the complexity of the role of the thalamic nuclei in psychosis, we introduced micro-co-activation patterns (μCAPs) by employing this method on the human genetic model of schizophrenia 22q11.2 deletion s...

Moving from association to causal analysis of neuroimaging data is crucial to advance our understanding of brain function. The arrow-of-time (AoT), that is, the known asymmetric nature of the passage of time, is the bedrock of causal structures shaping physical phenomena. However, almost all current time series metrics do not exploit this asymmetry...

The amygdala is a key region in emotional regulation, which is often impaired in psychosis. However, it is unclear if amygdala dysfunction directly contributes to psychosis, or whether it contributes to psychosis through symptoms of emotional dysregulation. We studied the functional connectivity of amygdala subdivisions in patients with 22q11.2DS,...

The topological organization of brain networks, or connectomes, can be quantified using graph theory. Here, we investigated brain networks in higher dimensional spaces defined by up to ten node-level graph theoretical invariants. Nodal invariants are intrinsic nodal properties which reflect the topological characteristics of the nodes with respect...

Objectives: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe, chronic, affective disorder characterized by recurrent switching between mood states, psychomotor and cognitive symptoms, which can linger in euthymic states as residual symptoms. Hippocampal alterations may play a key role in the neural processing of BD symptoms. However, its dynamic functional conne...

Objectives: : Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe, chronic, affective disorder characterized by recurrent switching between mood states, psychomotor and cognitive symptoms, which can linger in euthymic states as residual symptoms. Hippocampal alterations may play a key role in the neural processing of BD symptoms. However, its dynamic functional conn...

Despite a lack of scientific consensus on the definition of emotions, they are generally considered to involve several modifications in the mind, body, and behavior. Although psychology theories emphasized multi-componential characteristics of emotions, little is known about the nature and neural architecture of such components in the brain. We use...

Patients with drug-resistant essential tremor (ET) may undergo Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgical thalamotomy (SRS-T), where the ventro-intermediate nucleus of the thalamus (Vim) is lesioned by focused beams of g