Franco Pestilli

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at University of Texas at Austin

The human sense of smell plays an important role in appetite and food intake, detecting environmental threats, social interactions, and memory processing. However, little is known about the neural circuity supporting its function. The olfactory tracts project from the olfactory bulb along the base of the frontal cortex, branching into several stria...

White matter bundle segmentation using diffusion MRI fiber tractography has become the method of choice to identify white matter fiber pathways in vivo in human brains. However, like other analyses of complex data, there is considerable variability in segmentation protocols and techniques. This can result in different reconstructions of the same in...

Occipitotemporal regions within the face network process perceptual and socioemotional information, but the dynamics and information flow between different nodes of this network are still debated. Here, we analyzed intracerebral EEG from 11 epileptic patients viewing a stimulus sequence beginning with a neutral face with direct gaze. The gaze could...

The implementation of social distancing policies is key to reducing the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic. However, their effectiveness ultimately depends on human behavior. In the United States, compliance with social distancing policies has widely varied thus far during the pandemic. But what drives such variability? Through six open datase...

White matter bundle segmentation using diffusion MRI fiber tractography has become the method of choice to identify white matter fiber pathways in vivo in human brains. However, like other analyses of complex data, there is considerable variability in segmentation protocols and techniques. This can result in different reconstructions of the same in...

The findings of AlShebli Makovi & Rahwan1 highlight an endemic problem in science: co-authoring with men is associated with greater numbers of citations for junior scientists than co-authoring with women. The reasons for this likely stem from a long history and culture in science where White, straight, cisgender men are the dominant force. Under th...

Tractography has created new horizons for researchers to study brain connectivity in vivo. However, tractography is an advanced and challenging method that has not been used so far for medical data analysis at a large scale in comparison to other traditional brain imaging methods. This work allows tractography to be used for large scale and high‑qu...

White matter bundle segmentation using diffusion MRI fiber tractography has become the method of choice to identify white matter fiber pathways in vivo in human brains. However, like other analyses of complex data, there is considerable variability in segmentation protocols and techniques. This can result in different reconstructions of the same in...

Significance Science is rapidly changing with the current movement to improve science focused largely on reproducibility/replicability and open science practices. Through network modeling and semantic analysis, this article provides an initial exploration of the structure, cultural frames of collaboration and prosociality, and representation of wom...

Healthcare industry players make payments to medical providers for non-research expenses. While these payments may pose conflicts of interest, their relationship with overall healthcare costs remains largely unknown. In this study, we linked Open Payments data on providers' industry payments with Medicare data on healthcare costs. We investigated 3...

The goal of this paper is to examine existing methods to study the "Human Brain Connectome" with a specific focus on the neurophysiological ones. In recent years, a new approach has been developed to evaluate the anatomical and functional organization of the human brain: the aim of this promising multimodality effort is to identify and classify neu...

Investigative studies of white matter (WM) brain structures using diffusion MRI (dMRI) tractography frequently require manual WM bundle segmentation, often called "virtual dissection". Human errors and personal decisions make these manual segmentations hard to reproduce, which have not yet been quantified by the dMRI community. The contribution of...

The topic of behavioral and structural deficits caused by concussions is an increasingly important 1 in the related research fields. With an incidence rate of 2.9 competition concussions per 1,000 athlete exposures (NCAA 2013) in collegiate football, the concussion risk to athletes is significant. However, even subconcussive blows, or blows that do...

Objectives Though sub-concussive impacts are common during contact sports, there is little consensus whether repeat blows affect brain function. Using a “lifetime exposure” rather than acute exposure approach, we examined oculomotor performance and brain activation among collegiate football players and two control groups. Our analysis examined whet...

The ability to map brain networks in living individuals is fundamental in efforts to chart the relation between human behavior, health and disease. Advances in network neuroscience may benefit from developing new frameworks for mapping brain connectomes. We present a framework to encode structural brain connectomes and diffusion-weighted magnetic r...

Loci in ventral temporal cortex are selectively active during viewing of faces and other objects, but it remains unclear whether these areas represent accumulation of simple visual information or processing of intact percept. We measured broadband electrocorticographic changes from implanted electrodes on the ventral temporal brain surface while sh...

We describe a fully automatic framework for classification of two types of dementia based on the differences in the shape of brain structures. We consider Alzheimer’s disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment of individuals who converted to AD within 18 months (MCIc), and normal controls (NC). Our approach uses statistical learning and a feature spac...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder found to have widespread alterations in the function and synchrony of brain regions. These differences may underlie alterations in microstructural organization, such as in white matter pathways. To investigate the diffusion of major white matter tracts, the current study examined multi...

Individuals sometimes show inconsistent risk preferences, including excessive attraction to gambles featuring small chances of winning large amounts (called "positively skewed" gambles). While functional neuroimaging research indicates that nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and anterior insula (AIns) activity inversely predict risky choice, structural conne...

With several large-scale human brain projects currently underway and a range of neuroimaging techniques growing in availability to researchers, the amount and diversity of data relevant for understanding the human brain is increasing rapidly. A complete understanding of the brain must incorporate information about 3D neural location, activity, timi...

The number of neuroimaging data sets publicly available is growing at fast rate. The increase in availability and resolution of neuroimaging data requires modern approaches to signal processing for data analysis and results validation. We introduce the application of sparse multiway decomposition methods (Caiafa and Cichocki, 2012) to linearized ne...

Amblyopia is a visual disorder caused by poorly coordinated binocular input during development. Little is known about the impact of amblyopia on the white matter within the visual system. We studied the properties of six major visual white-matter pathways in a group of adults with amblyopia (n=10) and matched controls (n=10) using diffusion weighte...

Neuroscience is transforming. Brain data collected in multitudes of individuals and institutions around the world are being openly shared, moved from office desks and personal storage devices to institutionally supported cloud systems and public repositories—effectively bringing Neuroscience into the era of Big Data. This is an important evolution...

Saccade planning may invoke spatially-specific feedback signals that bias early visual activity in favor of top-down goals. We tested this hypothesis by measuring cortical activity at the early stages of the dorsal and ventral visual processing streams. Human subjects maintained saccade plans to (prosaccade) or away (antisaccade) from a spatial loc...

This talk will present a general methodological overview of diffusion MRI (dMRI), with a special focus on methods used to image connectivity and tissue properties in the human visual system. We will start by describing the principles of dMRI measurements. We will then provide an overview of models that are used to describe the signal and make infer...

Neuroimaging experiments that map limb motions on to the brain observe fractured somatotopic maps, with correlated neural responses across functionally related joints in the arm [1]. Analyzing such experiments involves visually comparing winner-takes-all neural activation maps for different subjects that are generated with generalized linear models...