Discovering Relations Between Mind, Brain, and Mental Disorders Using Topic Mapping

Date

2012-10-11

Authors

Poldrack, Russell A.
Mumford, Jeanette A.
Schonberg, Tom
Kalar, Donald
Barman, Bishal
Yarkoni, Tal

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Abstract

Neuroimaging research has largely focused on the identification of associations between brain activation and specific mental functions. Here we show that data mining techniques applied to a large database of neuroimaging results can be used to identify the conceptual structure of mental functions and their mapping to brain systems. This analysis confirms many current ideas regarding the neural organization of cognition, but also provides some new insights into the roles of particular brain systems in mental function. We further show that the same methods can be used to identify the relations between mental disorders. Finally, we show that these two approaches can be combined to empirically identify novel relations between mental disorders and mental functions via their common involvement of particular brain networks. This approach has the potential to discover novel endophenotypes for neuropsychiatric disorders and to better characterize the structure of these disorders and the relations between them.

Department

Description

Russell A. Poldrack is with UT Austin, Jeanette A. Mumford is with UT Austin, Tom Schonberg is with UT Austin, Donald Kalar is with the NASA Ames Research Center, Bishal Barman is with UT Austin, Tal Yarkoni is with Colorado University.

LCSH Subject Headings

Citation

Poldrack RA, Mumford JA, Schonberg T, Kalar D, Barman B, et al. (2012) Discovering Relations Between Mind, Brain, and Mental Disorders Using Topic Mapping. PLoS Comput Biol 8(10): e1002707. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002707