SP3: Neuroimaging backbone and large-scale data harmonization

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Felix Blankenburg, since 6/2022; Professor Dr. Henrik Walter
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience ; Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442075332

Neuroimaging is an important tool delivering information about brain processes relevant for psychotherapy research. In our prospective-longitudinal observational psychotherapy cohort (see SP1) we therefore will use a neuroimaging battery at baseline that is focused on different aspects of emotion regulation which we consider to be a key mechanism in psychotherapy. The subproject has three work packages. In the first work package we will pilot and optimize our neuroimaging battery. It consists of three emotion regulation tasks, spanning the spectrum from automatic to voluntary emotion regulation, resting state-MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) as well as structural MRI. The second work package is to guarantee the proper conduction of the main study by training of data acquisition, to perform continuous quality checks of acquired data, and to deliver preprocessed and basic first level data for task base and resting state fMRI. For harmonized preprocessing and analyses we will use our pipeline HALFpipe. Within the third work package we will perform data driven connectomics analyses using resting state fMRI for prediction of non-response using our newly developed NBS-predict tool. NBS-Predict combines the data driven construction of sparse networks that can be biologically interpreted and machine learning algorithms for prediction.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5187: Towards precision psychotherapy for non-respondent patients: From signatures to predictions to clinical utility
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Hauke Reiner Heekeren, until 6/2022