Stephen LaConte

Assistant Professor in the VTCRI and of Biomedical Engineering and Science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech

Description of work

Research in the LaConte lab is devoted to advanced neuroimaging acquisition and data analysis approaches, aimed at understanding and rehabilitating neurological and psychiatric diseases. A major focus of the lab is an innovation in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which we developed and call “temporally adaptive brain state” (TABS) fMRI. The inception of TABS arose from two major recent advances in neuroimaging, namely 1) the recognition that multi-voxel patterns of fMRI data can be used to decode brain states (determine what the volunteer was “doing” – e.g. receiving sensory input, effecting motor output, or otherwise internally focusing on a prescribed task or thought) and 2) continued advances in MR imaging systems and experimental sophistication with fMRI that have led to the emergence of real-time fMRI as a viable tool for biofeedback.

Previous position

Assistant Professor, Baylor College of Medicine

Education

• University of Minnesota: Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering
• Emory University: Post doctoral fellowship
• Georgia Institute of Technology: Post doctoral fellowship

Related links

• LaConte Lab

Selected publications

• S. M. LaConte. (2011). Decoding fMRI brain states in real-time. NeuroImage, 56:440-54.
• M. A. McHenry and S. M. LaConte. (2011). Computer Speech Recognition as an Objective Measure of Intelligibility. J Med Speech Lang Pathol, 18:99-103.
• Z. Yang, S. LaConte, X. Weng, and X. Hu.. (2008). Ranking and averaging independent component analysis by reproducibility (RAICAR). Hum Brain Mapp, 29:711–725.
• S. M. LaConte, S. J. Peltier, and X. P. Hu.. (2007). Real-time fMRI using brain-state classification. Hum Brain Mapp, 208:1033–1044.
• S. LaConte, S. Strother, V. Cherkassky, J. Anderson, and X. Hu.. (2005). Support vector machines for temporal classification of block design fMRI data. Neuroimage, 26:317–329.

Curriculum vitae

Download Stephen LaConte's CV.