Military and Civilian Applications of Wavelet Analysis for Traumatic Brain Injury

Series
Applied and Computational Mathematics Seminar
Time
Monday, October 22, 2012 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Alessio Medda – Aerospace Transportation and Advanced System Laboratory, Georgia Tech Research Institute – Alessio.Medda@gtri.gatech.edu
Organizer
Sung Ha Kang
In this talk, I will present two examples of the application of wavelet analysis to the understanding of mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI). First, the talk will focus on how wavelet-based features can be used to define important characteristics of blast-related acceleration and pressure signatures, and how these can be used to drive a Naïve Bayes classifier using wavelet packets. Later, some recent progress on the use of wavelets for data-driven clustering of brain regions and the characterization of functional network dynamics related to mTBI will be discussed. In particular, because neurological time series such as the ones obtained from an fMRI scan belong to the class of long term memory processes (also referred to as 1/f-like processes), the use of wavelet analysis guarantees optimal theoretical whitening properties and leads to better clusters compared to classical seed-based approaches.