This Saturday I will be running a brain imaging and coding workshop for JCU’s NeuroSTEM day in Townsville. The event brings Year 10 and 11 students together to learn about the brain and stress, with activities covering anatomy, physiology and imaging. I’ve put together a Jupyter notebook for my session, which you can open here:

If you’re attending the workshop, use the Binder button to run the notebook in your browser. You don’t need to install anything or have programmed before; the code is supplied. Binder can take a few minutes to start, so give it some time to load.

The idea is to work through some of the steps involved in using brain images for a research study. In particular, it explores registration, extracting PET biomarkers, and statistical analysis

The lab uses synthetic data – it isn’t real patient data, but the images appear real enough to give intuition into real scientific analysis pipelines.

The GitHub repository includes the notebook, a facilitator guide and presenter notes. If you’re putting together a similar STEM activity, you’re welcome to use or adapt them; the README has the licence and attribution details.