Lab Roles

For the 2019-2020 year the lab will be expanding to include two new graduate students! It's been a long time coming, but this is my first attempt at organizing roles for our lab members.

PI: Chris

I'd say this is self-explanatory, except my job description is very nebulous. Right now, it includes:

• Participant Payments
• Covering Expenses
• Methods Development
• Sometimes scanning
• Initial training

fMRI Experiments (SemCat)

Scheduling: Andrew Hall

The person responsible for scheduling should always have available the pool of available time slots for any in-lab or MRI appointments. Responsible experimenters should ensure that this pool is kept up-to-date. Interested participants may contact us via the lab gmail email address or the lab phone number. The person responsible for scheduling should check the lab voicemail at least weekly and the gmail account more often, with the goal of replying to interested participants within 1 week of contact.

Initial Scheduling (Prescreening)

Initial scheduling for an fMRI experiment should begin by filtering for eligibility to avoid wasting time and money, and only potentially eligible participants should be scheduled for initial prescreening:

• Healthy adult (18+ years of age) able to give informed consent
• Native English fluency
  • The participant may know other languages but must be able to read/write/speak/comprehend English at the same level of fluency as an adult monolingual speaker
• Right-handed
• No history of neurological or cognitive impairment:
  • Learning disability
  • ADD/ADHD
  • Head injury leading to a concussion
  • History of seizures, stroke, narcolepsy, multiple sclerosis
• Not taking any prescription medication that affects the central nervous system (these drugs may lead to atypical brain functioning, and it may be unsafe to go off medication for 24h prior to scanning):
  • e.g., Adderall or other stimulant for ADD/ADHD
  • e.g., Antidepressants
  • e.g., Medications containing opioids
• Not pregnant or planning to become pregnant
• No metal implants or non-removable piercings
• No history of claustrophobia (the scanner bore is narrow)
• Able to lay relatively still for extended periods of time without discomfort
  • This may preclude individuals with orthopaedic conditions (e.g., back problems)

Prescreening scheduling should be done in collaboration with the pool of experimenters who will be running the experiment so that we know what times we can invite prospective participants to the lab. As many as two participants can be scheduled simultaneously.

MRI Scheduling

We ideally will scan multiple participants on a given day, usually Sundays. We usually scan after 2 PM, but that can vary. It's also preferred that we schedule a scan two or more weeks in advance. Once we have a small pool of participants who are eligible to be scanned, look ahead to the next available scan date to find the window of scan times that are available. We have recently found that a scan takes about 60 minutes, plus about 15 minutes to prepare. We can therefore have some overlap in participants, where one participant arrives while the previous one is still in the scanner. A suggested timeline might be the following, assuming a start time of 2 PM (14:00):

13:45: Participant 1 arrives, completes all safety screening sheets and prepares for scanning
14:00: Participant 1 goes in the scanner
14:45: Participant 2 arrives, completes all safety screening sheets, and prepares for scanning
15:00: Participant 1 exits the scanner, Participant 2 goes in the scanner
15:45: Participant 3 arrives, completes all safety screening sheets and prepares for scanning
16:00: Participant 2 exits the scanner, Participant 3 goes in the scanner
 ...etc., with each successive participant arriving 15 minutes before the end of the previous scan.

Of course, there's sometimes a delay, so with additional participants, later scans might get backed up. But assuming everything goes smoothly, this would be an ideal schedule where we plan to have each participant arrive about 15 minutes before we intend to put them into the scanner.

Because we are trying to find times that accommodate as many participants as possible in a single afternoon block, tools like Doodle Poll could be quite helpful. I would probably write an email to all potential participants (using the BCC field for all email addresses) along the following lines:

Thank you for your interest in the CCN Lab fMRI Experiment!
We are currently scheduling participants for $DATE between $START_TIME and $END_TIME. The scan session should last about 75 minutes, and you will be reimbursed with a $30 Amazon Gift Card. Below is a link to a doodle poll where you can indicate your availability. Please reply to the doodle poll in the next day, indicating your first name and the time slots you can attend so that we can accommodate as many participants as possible. If we don't hear from you in the next day or so, we'll follow up to see if you're still interested or have any questions. Of course, if you have any questions before then or are having problems replying to the doodle poll, please reply to this email to let us know right away!
Sincerely,
The CCN Lab at the University at Buffalo

Data Triage and Organization: Unassigned

Following a scan, we will have several MRI files and several MATLAB runtime data files for each participant (theoretically: 1 for each completed run). It should be a priority to ensure that these data are transferred to the UBFS/openfmri folders so that no data gets lost, and that everyone can access the data for whatever projects they are working on. If data are acquired on a Sunday, I'd like to have the data uploaded to ubfs by the end of Monday.

MRI Data

The raw MRI data for a participant should go in a folder with the participant name in the /raw/ folder underneath the appropriate project directory. For example, new data for Subject 001 Session 1 in the Semantic Categories experiment (SemCat) would be found in:

• ubfs
  • openfmri
    • SemCat
      • raw
        • 0001_SESS_1

MATLAB Files

The BOLD data for participants is going to be uninperpretable unless we also know the events that happend during the experiment. These file are produced on the Experimenter Laptop during the experiment and can be found in the MUMBLE_MUMBLE folder. These files need to be copied to the matfiles folder for the appropriate project in the ubfs folder. For example, the 6 .mat files for Subject 0001 in the SemCat experiment would be copied to:

• ubfs
  • openfmri
    • SemCat
      • matfiles