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Welcome to our ABC Seminars! This seminar series is open for everyone. The talk will take place in . After the talks, coffee and pulla will be served.

The event will be also streamed via Zoom at: 

Infant MEG: challenges, solutions, and neuroscientific findings

Abstract: The human brain develops rapidly during the first months and years of life. Non-invasive neuroimaging can provide researchers with unprecedented information on the underlying mechanisms of this early development, but many technological challenges must be overcome to ensure reliable data analysis. The infant brain has a complicated electric conductivity structure that changes with age, which renders accurate source analysis based on electroencephalography (EEG) data extremely difficult. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), on the other hand, is less affected by the details of the conductivity structure, but MEG recordings of awake infants pose several other challenges that need to be addressed. These challenges include, for example, distortions of the spatial structure of the MEG signals due to head movements as well as complications caused by varying signal-to-noise ratio corresponding to changing source-to-sensor distances. In this talk, I will present solutions to these issues and show some of the procedures and practices of infant MEG conducted at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. Finally, I will review some of our recent infant MEG neuroscience studies with interesting findings on biomarkers in dyslexia, word processing mechanism in infants, and the impact of early social interaction on later learning of language.

Bio: Samu Taulu is an Associate Professor of Physics and director of the I-LABS MEG Brain Imaging Center at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. He received his M.Sc. in Finland at the department of Technical Physics at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) in 2000. He earned his Ph.D. in the field of Applied Mathematics in Technical Physics from HUT in 2008 while working for the Finnish company manufacturing MEG devices, Neuromag Ltd. (presently MEGIN Oy), focusing primarily on physics-related aspects of MEG instrumentation and signal processing as part of the research and development team. Some of the main methods developed by Taulu and his colleagues, including the signal space separation (SSS) method, have been motivated by the challenges of signal processing of the infant MEG measurements that were carried out in collaboration between I-LABS and BioMag laboratory of Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland, in 2001. These methods have since then been further developed through international collaboration with medical doctors, neuroscientists, and physicists. Since 2014, Samu Taulu has been leading the infant MEG work at I-LABS while also contributing to the general development of novel MEG instrumentation, processing, and data analysis methods.