fMRI and toolboxes

As I am studying a lot about fMRI this semester, I learned a lot (and so many toolboxes installed in my laptop now!) about fMRI data analysis.

Of course, I definitely need tutorials to learn these stuffs as I am not familiar at all about medical images before. And it gets more and more interesting to learn about brains as the semester goes. One of the tutorials that I found so much helpful is by Andy.

http://andysbrainblog.blogspot.com

His blog is one of my stops when looking for fMRI tutorials. I like the simple and clear explanations and the step-by-step tutorials that he presented in his writing and videos.

Some of the fMRI tools that I've used (I'll probably make some description later when I have time, will put links on the tools too inshaAllah)

• SPM (this is MATLAB-based)
• FSL - contains a lot of toolboxes to analyze fMRI in different types of analysis)
• AFNI (haven't used it yet, but am interested to learn)
• R statistics
• and more others to come. 

As I'm seeing a lot of blogs/website specifically sharing methods for fMRI data analysis, I'm envisioning myself to do the same. My aim might be to put things in layman explanations - since I am learning basically a lot of new things through my PhD program, I would like for public to know the same at least the basics and what's important for normal people (non-medical especially) to know.

Pray for me to be steadfast!

ps: For my PhD preliminary exam this coming week - "O my Lord, expand my chest; ease my task for me; and remove the impediment from my speech; so they may understand what I say" Quran - Taha:25-27.

Segmentations and Dimensionality Reduction

So far I have been learning a lot about these two terms. But I haven't quite really clear on the exact differences, theoretically.

Both of these are very important in defining regions in medical images, particularly in fMRI for my research. I am definitely in need to really master the theories before doing any major math research on these.

So, the topics that are interest me now:

• PCA, ICA, SIFT
• Sliding window approach
• Covariance/correlation matrices
• Functional Connectivity in fMRI

So much to learn, yet so little time. May Allah ease. :)

Journal Information

My reference to check on a journal's information

I usually check a journal's ranking through JCR for ISI journals

So, from the front page, you will see this

Select the preferences that you would like to search here.

If you would like to search a specific group of journals, keep the first bullet on the right and submit. Choose the groups that you would like to see, and the list will come out.

If you want to see all journals in this JCR, select the third bullet. Or you can check a specific journal using the second, if you just want to know a particular journal.

And here is a sample result page of the searched journals:

Select a journal that you want to see, there will be a lot of information related to the journal. Some of the info that I might be interested in:

Journal Information
Here you can have a lot of information about the publisher, in what categories does it belongs to, and the journal ranking.

Citations Information
At the top of the page, you can see a table providing information on 'how much this journal gives an impact to the area'

Journal Ranking
If you click 'Journal Ranking' box in at the Journal Information, a new page will show up - where you can find which quartile the journal falls into. For example, this IEEE Transactions of Fuzzy Systems is ranked in Q1, first quartile for both Computer Science and Electrical & Electronic Engineering categories.

The highest ranking is in Quartile 1 (Q1), means this journal is very high ranked among the journals in its category. 

Impact Factor

The impact factor as defined in Wikipedia, as well as other measures change every year.

The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal.

The more citations a journal has, the higher the impact factor will be. High citations could mean the journal is very good by having a lot of articles being referenced by other articles. Can you imagine your paper is being cited/referenced by other people? Don't you feel good? 

I am yet to learn other terms, but so far these are the information that I have been using for now.

Some (maybe) related papers on Crying Babies Identifier

Some of the papers that I managed to google around about the crying baby:

• http://spl.telhai.ac.il/speech/splnews/upload/ieeei2012_submission_215%20%287%29.pdf
• http://www.ijteee.org/final-print/feb2015/An-Automatic-Infants-Cry-Detection-Using-Linear-Frequency-Cepstrum-Coefficientslfcc.pdf
• https://news.brown.edu/articles/2013/07/crybaby
• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224103355.htm
• http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/research/publications/Ruvolo_Movellan_Automatic_Cry_Detection_2008.pdf
• http://research.ijcaonline.org/volume102/number12/pxc3898800.pdf

Points to find

- what do they research

- relation to what vandy is doing

- method that they use

- performance

I have yet to read all those, will look into those later on.

New research life

Bismillahirrahmanirrahim...

Here I will put some notes on my documentation for my research at Vandy. I know it's not the best place to put it because all the data are not to be placed here. But some general infos and methods might be useful to other people in the future.

This blog will be the reference pitstop for:

• - general info related to my research (signal processing and control system)
• - Methods that are being used outside (not the ones that are not published yet)
• - Some list of conferences that could be related
• - Others that I might think of later.

Generally speaking, it's just for my reference while doing my research. That's all. 

So, beginning with the name of Allah, may Allah be with me going through the PhD life and the life after as a researcher of life. Ameen :)