Anastasia Yendiki, PhD
Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School
Associate Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
PhD, Electrical Engineering: Systems, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Anastasia’s research program develops analytic tools for mapping brain circuitry by harnessing data from non-invasive neuroimaging and invasive anatomic studies. Her work has two main themes. One theme is the development of algorithms for reconstructing white-matter pathways from diffusion MRI scans. She has developed TRACULA (TRActs Constrained by UnderLying Anatomy), a toolbox for diffusion MRI pre-processing, tractography, and statistical analysis. The other theme is the use of ex vivo microscopy techniques to obtain accurate models of white-matter fiber bundles and to investigate how diffusion MRI data should be acquired and analyzed to maximize the anatomic accuracy of tractography. The ultimate goal is to link the two themes described above, i.e., take advantage of the highly accurate models of connectional anatomy that can be obtained from ex vivo microscopy to develop better tools for reconstructing this anatomy from in vivo diffusion MRI.
Anastasia leads the center for Large-scale Imaging of Neural Circuits (LINC), one of the five UM1 comprehensive centers funded by the BRAIN Initiative Connectivity across Scales (CONNECTS) program to image brain connections at unprecedented resolutions.
