Dr. Hongmei Zhu from York University Delivered an Academic report in College of ISE

　At the afternoon of Dec. 20th , Dr. Hongmei Zhu from York University, Canada gave an academic report titled “Time-varying statistical measures for studying brain functional connectivity”. The primary contents of her report are the adaptive S transform and its application in MEG (magnetoencephalogram) data analysis. Fengrong Sun, the professor of College of ISE, hosted the report, and some of the faculty and the students attended the lecture.
　　Dr. Zhu started her total report from a question as how our brains worked. As the existence of this question, researchers recorded the electromagnetic reflect of our brains under different surroundings using the MEG, but they found that Brain was a complex, non-stationary, massively interconnected dynamic system from the MEG data, which made it hard to analyze the data using previous signal analysis methods. Based on this situation, a new approach was presented -- the S transform (ST). Then Dr. Zhu gave a brief introduction of the inventor of ST, the origin of this theory and the advantages of ST which was different others in MEG data analysis field. Because of the limits of conventional ST, the team of Dr. Zhu proposed an improved ST which was called the adaptive S transform (AST). Afterwards she put her emphasis on the difference between AST and ST, and she analyzed the strengths of AST in MEG. After that Dr. Zhu played a game related to the Multi-source Interference Task (MSIT) with the audiences to describe the practical applications of the AST used in MIST MEG data analysis. Sufficient clinical experiments drew a conclusion that the AST could perform better in analyzing the MEG of our brains under MSIT. Finally, Dr. Zhu expressed her hopes to corporate with the faculty and the students of College of ISE.
　　 After the report, Dr. Zhu patiently answered the questions from the audience and exchanged ideas with them. And he was warmly applauded by the listeners.
　　 Dr. Zhu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, Canada. She holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo and worked as a MS Society of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at the Seaman MR Centre at Foothills Hospital, University of Calgary between 2001 and 2004. Hongmei’s research interests are in the areas of time-frequency analysis, data analysis, numerical computations and their applications in real-world problems arisen from biomedicine and other industries.