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Biography |
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Professor Andrew C. Papanicolaou began his academic career as a National Merit Scholar in the School of Philosophy of the National University of Athens, Greece and in 1978 he received his doctorate in Psychology from Southern Illinois University. Since 1980 he has been with the University of Texas Medical School, where he directs the Center for Clinical Neurosciences (www.uth.tmc.edu/clinicalneuro). He is a professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, Neurosurgery and Neurology and he holds adjunct appointments in the Department of Linguistics of Rice University and the Department of Psychology of the University of Houston. In 2002 he founded and until 2006 directed the Summer Institute of Advanced Studies of the International Neuropsychological Society. Since 2008 he directs the graduate program in clinical Neuropsychology at the Neurology Department of the National University of Athens. He is a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of several distinctions and grant awards from NIH, NSF and other federal and private foundations for his research in epilepsy, developmental disorders, brain plasticity and in imaging of the brain mechanisms of cognitive functions, conducted in his two Magnetoencephalography laboratories at the Houston Medical Center. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and several books ranging from technical manuals and clinical textbooks to theoretical monographs.
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Abstract |
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The frontier of Functional Brain imaging
The main functional imaging methods, namely, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Magnetoencephalography (MEG),Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Diffusion Tensor Imagnig (DTI) will each be briefly described; their present application to basic research and clinical practice will be reviewed and the future directions of the field will be outlined. Specifically, the following topics will be covered:
1. The nature of brain activity visualized by each method.
2. The application of the methods in imaging the brain mechanisms of cognitive, linguistic and affective functions.
3. Their use in exploring the limits of brain plasticity.
4. Their present and expected contributions to reducing morbidity through pre-surgical functional mapping and substitution of invasive diagnostic procedures.
4.Disambiguating behaviorally based diagnoses for developmental and psychiatric disorders and disclosing their neurophysiological mechanisms.
All the above mentioned applications will be illustrated with concrete examples from published reports or unpublished material from our laboratories and clinics
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