Elvisha Dhamala

The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research

White matter pathways between neurons facilitate neuronal coactivation patterns in the brain. Insight into how these structural and functional connections underlie complex cognitive functions provides an important foundation with which to delineate disease‐related changes in cognitive functioning. Here, we integrate neuroimaging, connectomics, and...

Individual differences in brain anatomy can be used to predict variations in cognitive ability. Most studies to date have focused on broad population-level trends, but the extent to which the observed predictive features are shared across sexes and age groups remains to be established. While it is standard practice to account for intracranial volum...

A fundamental goal across the neurosciences is the characterization of relationships linking brain anatomy, functioning, and behavior. Although various MRI modalities have been developed to probe these relationships, direct comparisons of their ability to predict behavior have been lacking. Here, we compared the ability of anatomical T1, diffusion...

Psychiatric illnesses are heterogeneous in nature. No illness manifests in the same way across individuals, and no two patients with a shared diagnosis exhibit identical symptom profiles. Over the last several decades, group-level analyses of in vivo neuroimaging data have led to fundamental advances in our understanding of the neurobiology of psyc...

Background: Individual differences in functional brain connectivity can be used to predict both the presence of psychiatric illness and variability in associated behaviors. However, despite evidence for sex differences in functional network connectivity and in the prevalence, presentation, and trajectory of psychiatric illnesses, the extent to whi...

Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) include a range of sub-threshold symptoms that resemble aspects of psychosis but do not necessarily indicate the presence of psychiatric illness. These experiences are highly prevalent in youth and are associated with developmental disruptions across social, academic, and emotional domains. While not all youth who...

Sex differences in effective brain connectivity in emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, and stimuli-induced negative emotions have been highlighted in previous research. However, to our knowledge, no research has yet investigated the sex-specific effective connectivity related to negative emotions in healthy population during resting-state...

To bring biomarkers closer to clinical application, they should be generalizable, reliable, and maintain performance within the constraints of routine clinical conditions. The functional striatal abnormalities (FSA), is among the most advanced neuroimaging biomarkers in schizophrenia, trained to discriminate diagnosis, with post-hoc analyses indica...

Background The biological mechanisms that contribute to cocaine and other substance use disorders involve an array of cortical and subcortical systems. Prior work on the development and maintenance of substance use has largely focused on cortico-striatal circuits, with relatively less attention on alterations within and across large-scale functiona...

Sex and gender are associated with human behavior throughout the lifespan and across health and disease, but whether they are associated with similar or distinct neural phenotypes is unknown. Here, we demonstrate that, in children, sex and gender are uniquely reflected in the intrinsic functional connectivity of the brain. Unimodal networks are mor...

Neuroimaging visualizations form the centerpiece of the interpretation and communication of scientific results, and are a cornerstone for data quality control. Often, these images and figures are produced by manually changing settings on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). There now exist many well-documented code-based brain visualization tools that...

To bring biomarkers closer to clinical application, they should be generalizable, reliable, and maintain performance within the constraints of routine clinical conditions. The functional striatal abnormalities (FSA), is among the most advanced neuroimaging biomarkers in schizophrenia, trained to discriminate diagnosis, with post hoc analyses indica...

To bring biomarkers closer to clinical application, they should be generalizable, reliable, and maintain performance within the constraints of routine clinical conditions. The functional striatal abnormalities (FSA), is among the most advanced neuroimaging biomarkers in schizophrenia, trained to discriminate diagnosis, with post-hoc analyses indica...

The functional properties of the human brain arise, in part, from the vast assortment of cell types that pattern the cortex. The cortical sheet can be broadly divided into distinct networks, which are further embedded into processing streams, or gradients, that extend from unimodal systems through higher-order association territories. Here, using t...

A classic distinction in psychiatry has been the study of externalizing and internalizing traits. However, the extent to which shared or unique brain network features, such as patterns of functional connectivity, may predict internalizing and externalizing behaviors in children and adults remain poorly understood. Using a sample of 2262 children fr...

Alterations in brain function and structure are reported among individuals with substance use disorders (SUD). Prior work in this domain has focused on cortico-striatal circuits in the development and maintenance of SUD. In healthy populations, individual differences in behavior and cognition are reflected in variability across the collective set o...

Functional connectomes (FCs), represented by networks or graphs that summarize coactivation patterns between pairs of brain regions, have been related at a population level to age, sex, cognitive/behavioral scores, life experience, genetics, and disease/disorders. However, quantifying FC differences between individuals also provides a rich source o...

Neuroimaging visualizations form the centerpiece of the interpretation and communication of scientific results, and are also a cornerstone for data quality control. Often, these images and figures are produced by manually changing settings on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). There now exist many well-documented code-based brain visualization tools...

Background Individual differences in functional brain connectivity can be used to predict both the presence of psychiatric illness and variability in associated behaviors. However, despite evidence for sex differences in functional network connectivity and in the prevalence, presentation, and trajectory of psychiatric illnesses, the extent to which...

A primary aim of precision psychiatry is the establishment of predictive models linking individual differences in brain functioning with clinical symptoms. In particular, cognitive impairments are transdiagnostic, treatment resistant, and contribute to poor clinical outcomes. Recent work suggests thousands of participants may be necessary for the a...

Across the brain sciences, institutions and individuals have begun to actively acknowledge and address the presence of racism, bias, and associated barriers to inclusivity within our community. However, even with these recent calls to action, limited attention has been directed to inequities in the research methods and analytic approaches we use. T...

Functional connectomes (FCs), represented by networks or graphs that summarize coactivation patterns between pairs of brain regions, have been related at a population level to age, sex, cognitive/behavioral scores, life experience, genetics and disease/disorders. However, quantifying FC differences between pairs of individuals also provides a rich...

Individual differences in brain anatomy can be used to predict variability in cognitive function. Most studies to date have focused on broad population-level trends, but the extent to which the observed predictive features are shared across sexes and age groups remains to be established. While it is standard practice to account for intracranial vol...

A fundamental goal across the neurosciences is the characterization of relationships linking brain anatomy, functioning, and behavior. Although various MRI modalities have been developed to probe these relationships, direct comparisons of their ability to predict behavior have been lacking. Here, we compared the ability of anatomical T1, diffusion...

A thorough understanding of sex-independent and sex-specific neurobiological features that underlie cognitive abilities in healthy individuals is essential for the study of neurological illnesses in which males and females differentially experience and exhibit cognitive impairment. Here, we evaluate sex-independent and sex-specific relationships be...

A thorough understanding of sex-independent and sex-specific neurobiological features that underlie cognitive abilities in healthy individuals is essential for the study of neurological illnesses in which males and females differentially experience and exhibit cognitive impairment. Here, we evaluate sex-independent and sex-specific relationships be...

A thorough understanding of sex differences that exist in the brains of healthy individuals is crucial for the study of neurological illnesses that exhibit phenotypic differences between males and females. Here we evaluate sex differences in regional temporal dependence of resting‐state brain activity in 195 adult male–female pairs strictly matched...

S ummary How white matter pathway integrity and neural co-activation patterns in the brain relate to complex cognitive functions remains a mystery in neuroscience. Here, we integrate neuroimaging, connectomics, and machine learning approaches to explore how multimodal brain connectivity relates to cognition. Specifically, we evaluate whether integr...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) at all levels, from concussion through severe TBI, can negatively impact multiple systems in the human body. This multisystem disturbance is evidenced by the distributed nature and complex symptom patterns of TBI individuals including brain-based symptoms such as cognitive deficits and emotional lability, as well as aut...

A thorough understanding of sex differences, if any, that exist in the brains of healthy individuals is crucial for the study of neurological illnesses that exhibit differences in clinical and behavioural phenotypes between males and females. In this work, we evaluate sex differences in regional temporal dependence of resting-state brain activity u...

Purpose In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is the only technique capable of non‐invasively assessing metabolite concentrations in the brain. The lack of alternative methods makes validation of MRS measures challenging. The aim of this study is to assess the validity of MRS measures of human brain metabolite concentrations by comparing mu...