In this case study, we hear from Andrew Quinn, a researcher in Psychology, who uses BEAR to understand how brain activity changes through the adult lifespan.
We investigated how brain activity changes through the adult lifespan. This has been studied in previous publications, but the overall literature presents a mix of results.
Measures of brain function are highly complex, so studies may simplify to look at specific brain regions or timescales. Other studies might derive completely new metrics to quantify specific features of how the brain works. This makes for exciting science at the level of individual papers, but it can be a challenge to compare results across such a broad range of approaches.
We worked to establish how age impacts brain function in the simplest, most generalisable way with minimal researcher degrees of freedom. Our results showed strong evidence of age-related changes that replicated across multiple independent data sets. Finally, we quantified the size of these effects and estimated the statistical power required for future studies of electrophysiology aging.
We used BEAR high-performance computing facilities to process many hundreds of MEG recordings. This allowed us to run computationally expensive analyses in parallel, estimate statistical models over tens of thousands of sensor/frequency combinations, and test the robustness of these models across many control cases. This would certainly have been impossible in a standard computing environment.
Andrew J Quinn, Jemma Pitt, Oliver Kohl, Chetan Gohil, Mats WJ van Es, Anna C Nobre, Mark W Woolrich(2025) Robust and replicable effects of ageing on resting state brain electrophysiology measured with MEG eLife 14:RP108829 https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.108829.2
We were pleased to hear how Andrew was able to use what is on offer from Advanced Research Computing. If you have any examples of how it has helped your research, please get in touch with us at bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk.
We are always looking for good examples of the use of High Performance Computing to nominate for HPC Wire Awards – see our recent winner for more details.