In diesem Sommersemester wird die im WiSe 2022/23 erfolgreich gestartete Vortragsreihe Medical Information Sciences fortgesetzt. Renommierte Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler unterschiedlicher Fachdisziplinen und Forschungsstandorte geben jeden Dienstag ab 17:30 Uhr Einblicke in aktuelle Fragestellungen und Anwendungsgebiete des breiten Forschungsfeldes Medical Information Sciences.

Specific phobia is a severe, widespread and irrational fear that may be associated with objects (e.g. spiders) or situations (e.g. enclosed spaces) that pose little or no danger. Studies of the neural basis of specific phobia often focus on a predicted fear network, leading to a pre-selection of brain regions to be studied. This pre-selection carries the risk of false-negative results, as large parts of the brain are not considered. Using the example of individuals diagnosed with spider phobia and a parallel control group who underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging in the task-independent resting state, the talk will present a data-driven method that overcomes these limitations. Multivariate pattern analysis, which considers the totality of functional connections in the brain (the connectome), was used to identify regions of maximum variance between experimental groups. The results were further characterised for behavioural relevance using metadata and post-hoc analyses.