Cover art for our paper featured on this month's homepage of @commsbio.nature.com!
25.09.2025 21:34
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Cover art for our paper featured on this month's homepage of @commsbio.nature.com!
Vaccines don't cause autism. What does? Mostly genes.
The number of people diagnosed with autism as screening has improved and the definition of autism has been expanded.
www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...
Co-first author paper with Tina Liu out now in @commsbio.nature.com
Our longitudinal fMRI data of child epilepsy patients with occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) resection show deviations from the expected topography in preserved cortex, demonstrating plasticity.
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Lastly, a special thank you to all participants and their families and also to Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Alliance for their continued support and assistance with our research!
Don't hesitate to reach out with any questions!
@cmu.edu @pittophathalmology.bsky.social @nyu.edu
This work is the collective efforts of co-first author
Tina Liu and co-authors Marge Maallo, Sophia Robert, Jason Fu, Christina Patterson, David Plaut, and Marlene Behrmann!
A special thank you too to @amepilepsysoc.bsky.social and
@ampsychfdn.bsky.social for providing funding for this work.
And a key clinical implication is that we see the rapid but atypical emergence of word representations in right OTC just months after left OTC resection, suggesting that surgical treatment itself may promote plasticity, but more work needs to be done with a larger sample.
In summary, our study highlights a striking case of plasticity: we show that when faces and words are constrained to develop in a single hemisphere, there is a dynamic competition such that after left surgery, word representations out-compete face representations, and vice versa.
Map of voxels for UD longitudinally, color-coded as to whether they represent faces or words
We see a similar pattern in patient UD. UD had a RIGHT OTC resection, and we observe face representations emerging in LEFT OTC, with voxels in his left OTC also "switching allegiance" from words to faces, an extension of Tina Liu's prior work: www.cell.com/cell-reports...
Map of voxels for TC longitudinally, color-coded as to whether they represent faces or words
Notably, we see that over time & pre- to post-surgery, voxels in TC's right OTC "switch allegiance" from representing faces to representing words. That is, word representations emerge in RIGHT OTC after LEFT OTC resection, a complete deviation from the standard topography.
Map of TC's word representations over time
For one patient (TC), we imaged her pre-surgery (at age 13y3m) and twice post-surgery (months and then years after surgery). While we cannot map word representations in superior temporal gyrus (light orange) or inferior frontal gyrus (yellow) PRE-surgery, we can POST-surgery.
Spatial map of visual category representations showing word representations in the right hemisphere
With the above in mind, here are a few highlights from our study:
First, we show in several cases of LEFT pediatric OTC resection that word representations are in fact lateralized to the RIGHT hemisphere, both in right OTC and right language cortex (shaded yellow/orange here).
Additionally, attributing deviations from the standard topography to plasticity necessitates tracking changes in preserved cortex, longitudinally. There is also the question of whether we may see pre- to post-surgical changes, i.e., can disease treatment enhance plasticity.
Word representations typically emerge in left OTC, presumably as language regions are also left-lateralized. However, we have not before demonstrated whether following left OTC resection, word representations lateralize in both right OTC and right language regions.
More recently, we showed with fMRI data from pediatric OTC resection patients that there are intact representations for both faces and words in patients' preserved OTC, including for exemplar individuation.
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
Our previous work supports the idea of such plasticity. In one study, we saw that patients developing with only a left or right hemisphere could perform face and word recognition tasks at ~85% accuracy independent of which hemisphere had been resected.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Example MRI of a patient with an OTC resection
Pediatric patients with unilateral resection develop with only a single OTC. If the topographic emergence of visual stimulus representations is truly malleable, face and word representations may come to emerge in preserved OTC, contralateral to the site of resection.
Over typical development, representations for face and word stimuli become largely segregated across the two hemispheres, with representations for faces and words predominantly lateralizing to right and left OTC, respectively. The question is how malleable is this organization?
Co-first author paper with Tina Liu out now in @commsbio.nature.com
Our longitudinal fMRI data of child epilepsy patients with occipitotemporal cortex (OTC) resection show deviations from the expected topography in preserved cortex, demonstrating plasticity.
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
As a demonstration of how ranked-choice voting gives voters more say and choices:
For the four races that appear on every New Yorker's ballot, there is a total of 123,743,040 possible ways someone could fill out a single ballot! And that doesn't even include down-ballot races.
During the NYC mayor debate segment on education, no one addressed staffing shortages affecting the Early Intervention Program, Committee on Preschool Special Education, & Office for People with Developmental Disabilities. Thousands of children aren't receiving services they need due to wait times
And hope to connect with clinicians and researchers on this app working in pediatric epilepsy surgery! #AES2024
Just joined Bluesky!👋
Looking forward to connecting with new and familiar folks in pediatrics, neurology, epilepsy, autism, cognitive neuroscience/neuroimaging, med and grad ed, and advocacy!
Image of poster on delineating behavioral and mental health outcomes following childhood hemispheric surgery
Joining the app to kickoff being back at #AES!
If you're interested in functional outcomes of epilepsy surgery, stop by poster #2.440 today where I'll be talking about my latest work with Pediatric Epilepsy Surgery Alliance on behavioral & mental health outcomes after pediatric hemispheric surgery.