Discovering relations between mind, brain, and mental disorders using topic mapping.
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.
Imaging Research Center and Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, United States of America. poldrack@mail.utexas.edu
Russell A
RA
Poldrack
Jeanette A
JA
Mumford
Tom
T
Schonberg
Donald
D
Kalar
Bishal
B
Barman
Tal
T
Yarkoni
D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology* / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D019295:Computational Biology; D057225:Data Mining; D006801:Humans; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D008959:Models, Neurological; D010641:Phenotype; D011897:Random Allocation