Teaching computational reproducibility for neuroimaging

Our trust in science is based on the assumed replicability of research results; however, scientific research is in the midst of a replication or reproducibility crisis following the realization that many individual findings are, in fact, not replicable. The field of neuroimaging is no exception. What does ‘reproducibility’ mean? Replication is independently repeating the methodology […]

Designing precision tools to mine DNA data

Ludmer Centre Scientific Director Celia Greenwood secured over $600K in funding for new research, Precision Medicine in Cellular Epigenomic, from the recent Genome Canada competitions.  To understand brain development, researchers need to unlock the secrets of our DNA. Currently, we can collect data on multiple aspects of DNA, but to extract meaning from the ever-expanding data trove requires the right […]

Parents shouldn’t worry if their infant doesn’t sleep through the night by 6-12 months of age

Study of close to 400 infants found no association between interrupted sleep and later developmental problems. New parents often expect their baby to start sleeping through the night by around six months of age. Indeed, they often receive messages from paediatricians and others about the importance of early sleep consolidation. But authors of a study […]

New algorithm improves ability to generate better genetic predictors

Researchers now have a new, more refined tool, the Polygenic-Risk-Score (PRS) on Spark, to help them understand an individual’s genetic risk for common illnesses, including mental illnesses. In an initial validation study, the newly developed software package successfully generated a polygenic risk score for a cohort of Canadian women that explained and predicted more of […]

Unique brain “fingerprint” can predict drug effectiveness

Technique can be used to better categorize patients with neurological disease, according to their therapeutic needs Personalized medicine – delivering therapies specially tailored to a patient’s unique physiology – has been a goal of researchers and doctors for a long time. New research provides a way of delivering personalized treatments to patients with neurological disease. […]

How emotions can affect childbirth, CTV interview

When it comes to maternal mental health, sadly, Canada lags behind other countries, like Australia and the UK, where pre- and post-natal mental health are subject to regular screening. Listen to CTV’s News at Noon, where Dr Kieran O’Donnell discussed the impact of prenatal anxiety and depression on the mother’s and the child’s long-term mental health with news […]

Separating children from parents can negatively affect brain development, CBC interview

Those administering policies that separate children from their parents clearly don’t understand the effects of early childhood trauma on the developing brain. In an interview with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald,  Dr Michael Meaney explains how parents insulate their children from stresses while their brains mature. When children are traumatically separated from parents their brain is forced to […]

LUDMER CENTRE TAKES OPEN SCIENCE TO THE NEXT LEVEL

Since arriving at McGill and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital more than 30 years ago, Alan Evans has helped the University and its network of affiliated hospitals build one of the world’s largest infrastructures of neuroscience research – from the high-resolution Big Brain atlas to supercomputing data-storage technology. These developments and others by his fellow researchers […]

McGill University and GPU.one join forces in push for neuroscience breakthroughs

Company will provide McGill’s Ludmer Research Centre with Big-Data processing capacity McGill University’s Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics & Mental Health has formed a collaboration with GPU.one, a Montreal-based private data colocation centre that will provide the Ludmer Centre’s neuroinformatics team at the McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (MCIN), with access to graphics-processing-unit (GPU) computational capacity, […]