Search

The public-facing commitments made by the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science (APCS) member programs, which consist of doctorate programs in clinical psychology as well as internship programs, will be analyzed. This study will quantitatively describe the range of public-facing statements (e.g., diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice [DEIJ] statements and antiracist statements) and provide programs with tools to self-assess their efforts to diversify their pool of trainees. Graduate and internship trainees carefully attend to recruitment materials relevant to DEIJ, especially those from underrepresented groups (Starck, Sinclair, & Shelton, 2021), thus making it crucial to provide programs with guidance about diversifying their trainee pool by using diversity statements. There are two primary investigative goals for this study. First, we aim to create a measure that anyone can use to assess a program’s public-facing DEIJ statements. We will assess the interrater reliability and inter-item relationships of the measure by rating the public-facing statements of the APCS programs. This brings us to the second investigative aim, which is to provide a characterization of the distribution of public-facing statements and their emphases. We believe that publishing these results will give rise to future directions of inquiry, such as relating public-facing statements with internal program evaluation of recruitment, retention, and program climate.

Functional MRI (fMRI) data are severely distorted by magnetic field (B0) inhomogeneities which currently must be corrected using separately acquired field map data. However, changes in the head position of a scanning participant across fMRI frames can cause changes in the B0 field, preventing accurate correction of geometric distortions. Additionally, field maps can be corrupted by movement during their acquisition, preventing distortion correction altogether. In this study, we use phase information from multi-echo (ME) fMRI data to dynamically sample distortion due to fluctuating B0 field inhomogeneity across frames by acquiring multiple echoes during a single EPI readout. Our distortion correction approach, MEDIC (Multi-Echo DIstortion Correction), accurately estimates B0 related distortions for each frame of multi-echo fMRI data. Here, we demonstrate that MEDIC's framewise distortion correction produces improved alignment to anatomy and decreases the impact of head motion on resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) maps, in higher motion data, when compared to the prior gold standard approach (i.e., TOPUP). Enhanced framewise distortion correction with MEDIC, without the requirement for field map collection, furthers the advantage of multi-echo over single-echo fMRI., Competing Interests: Competing Interests A.N.V., D.A.F. and N.U.F.D. have a financial interest in Turing Medical Inc. and may benefit financially if the company is successful in marketing FIRMM motion monitoring software products. A.N.V., D.A.F. and N.U.F.D. may receive royalty income based on FIRMM technology developed at Washington University School of Medicine and Oregon Health and Sciences University and licensed to Turing Medical Inc. D.A.F. and N.U.F.D. are co-founders of Turing Medical Inc. These potential conflicts of interest have been reviewed and are managed by Washington University School of Medicine, Oregon Health and Sciences University and the University of Minnesota. A.N.V. is now an employee of Turing Medical Inc. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Structural connections (SC) between distant regions of the brain support synchronized function known as functional connectivity (FC) and give rise to the large-scale brain networks that enable cognition and behavior. Understanding how SC enables FC is important to understand how injuries to structural connections may alter brain function and cognition. Previous work evaluating whole-brain SC-FC relationships showed that SC explained FC well in unimodal visual and motor areas, but only weakly in association areas, suggesting a unimodal-heteromodal gradient organization of SC-FC coupling. However, this work was conducted in group-averaged SC/FC data. Thus, it could not account for inter-individual variability in the locations of cortical areas and white matter tracts. We evaluated the correspondence of SC and FC within three highly sampled healthy participants. For each participant, we collected 78 minutes of diffusion-weighted MRI for SC and 360 minutes of resting state fMRI for FC. We found that FC was best explained by SC in visual and motor systems, as well as in anterior and posterior cingulate regions. A unimodal-to-heteromodal gradient could not fully explain SC-FC coupling. We conclude that the SC-FC coupling of the anterior-posterior cingulate circuit is more similar to unimodal areas than to heteromodal areas., Significance Statement: Structural connections between distant regions of the human brain support networked function that enables cognition and behavior. Improving our understanding of how structure enables function could allow better insight into how brain disconnection injuries impair brain function.Previous work using neuroimaging suggested that structure-function relationships vary systematically across the brain, with structure better explaining function in basic visual/motor areas than in higher-order areas. However, this work was conducted in group-averaged data, which may obscure details of individual-specific structure-function relationships.Using individual-specific densely sampled neuroimaging data, we found that in addition to visual/motor regions, structure strongly predicts function in specific circuits of the higher-order cingulate gyrus. The cingulate's structure-function relationship suggests that its organization may be unique among higher-order cortical regions.