Kabir Arora is a first-year student of the UM’s BSc Maastricht Science Programme (MSP). Over a period of 18 months, Kabir will be part of the MR-Methods group as a student within the Honoures Programme. Kabir investigates the effect of spatial smoothing on high-resolution fMRI, layer-fMRI, and column-fMRI with Renzo Huber. Kabir is aspiring to go into research within the field of Bioimaging. ​

In the recent years, it has been shown that anatomically informed smoothing can help to improve the layer-specific fMRI sensitivity without substantial loss of localication specificity. (e.g. see Blazwjewska et al., or Huber et al.). However, it is not clear, which smoothing parameters and which smoothing algorithms are providing the best compromise of spatial specificity and detection sensitivity. 

In the first part of the Honours program, Kabir will:

• Compare a set of various layer-fMRI smoothing algorithms.
• Optimize their parameter-space and improve their implementation in LAYNII. 
• Investigate the practicability and performance for neuroscientific layerfMRI studies.

The second part of the Honours project will focus on the application of the developed data-processing pipelines to investigate the overlap of finger representations in the human motor cortex.

Email: k.arora@student.maastrichtuniversity.nl