Education, History and Social Aspects of Brain Imaging - Social and Legal aspects of Brain Imaging

As the number of elderly people is rapidly increasing, we are facing a higher demand of diagnostic services, for example to detect neurodegenerative diseases. At the same time, the number of medical centers and experts remains almost constant, which poses a challenge. Tools for diagnostic assistance are urgently needed to improve the efficiency of healthcare. In three externally funded projects, we investigate aspects and strategies of how artificial intelligence (AI) prototype systems can be translated into functional healthcare applications. 

Today, we are witnessing rapid advancement of brain imaging technologies, not only in terms of their precision and our ability to characterize brain activities but also their accessibility. Now, one can easily order a device online that can track their brain activity as they go about their day, with the hope of making better decisions about their lives. But as with any technology, the development of brain imaging technologies and their utilization in our society will involve agents with their own economic and political motives, raising concerns regarding abuse of the technology. One brain imaging technology of particular concern is neurofeedback, a brain training technique based on feedback learning. Neurofeedback has the potential to relieve symptoms for various clinical populations and improve mental functions for healthy populations. However, recent studies suggest that it also has the potential to be abused. Studies have demonstrated that it can change people's facial preferences and mental associations covertly, rendering it a potentially dangerous tool for manipulating people's decision-making processes. While neurofeedback technology continues to evolve and become more accessible, it is important to examine, evaluate, and extend as needed, the legal framework for regulating its influence. Here, we describe a collaboration between neurofeedback researchers from Yale School of Medicine and members of the Yale Law School that aimed to begin this effort.¹ 

Sharing neuroimaging data through a direct request can be challenging both for researchers who request the data and those who agree to share their data. Unlike sharing through repositories that have standardized protocols and data sharing/use agreements, each party often needs to negotiate the terms of sharing and use of data case by case against the backdrop of complex ethical and regulatory requirements, not to mention the technical issues regarding data transfer and management. This study aims to help researchers navigate these challenges by examining what to consider during the process of data sharing and by offering recommendations and practical tips from a case study. 

Data sharing using a web-platform is becoming an integral part of the research life cycle. Not only data sharing allows reproducing analyses, a tenet of experimental research, but it also allows deepening analysis of existing datasets, combining data, meta-analysing and asking outright new question. Because neuroimaging data can be seen as personal data, this activity is challenging for EU-based researchers who have to comply with the General Data Protection regulation - the law that protects EU citizens from misusing their personal data. Here we introduce Public nEUro (https://public-neuro.github.io/index.html), a platform for EU-regulation-compliant data sharing. 

Prenatal drug exposure (PDE) and socioeconomic status (SES) are known to independently affect newborn brain functional network development (Gao 2015, Salzwedel 2015, Liu 2022). Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) studies in infants and children with PDE show connectivity disruptions in limbic regions involved in reward processing and emotion regulation (Morie 2019, Ross 2015, Salzwedel 2015, Liu 2022). SES has also been linked with infant functional connectivity development in the default-mode network (Gao 2015). However, little is known about the combined effect of PDE and SES on early neurodevelopment. In this study, we used rsfMRI to examine both the unique and potentially interactive effects of PDE and SES (i.e., indexed by maternal education (MEdu)) on functional connectivity at birth. 

Although a SARS-CoV-2 infection has been revealed to result in changes in human brain structure (1), the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the brain among uninfected individuals is still underexplored. Since adolescence is a sensitive period for the development of mental illnesses caused by stressful life events (2), it is important to understand the effect of stressful experiences on the adolescent brain, particularly the hippocampus. Thus, the COVID-19 pandemic, as one of extremely stressful life events, enabled us to examine the impact of stress on the adolescent hippocampus.