Mingzhou Ding, Ph.D.

An interdisciplinary team of UF researchers have found in a recent study that following total knee replacement, 23 percent of patients 60 years and older suffered decline of activity in at least one of three brain networks investigated, each related to specific cognitive functions. Of these patients, 15 percent underwent a decline in all networks.

“We have the patient go through a scan in the MRI so we can look at how the brain (networks are) changed by the surgery,” said Mingzhou Ding, Ph.D., one of the study’s senior authors and distinguished professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering. “After the surgery, we found that these networks’ internal connections are declined, signifying a neural injury.”

Due to effects of anesthesia and major surgery, such as total knee replacement, older adults sometimes develop postoperative cognitive decline. However, it is not yet completely understood which patients will acquire this condition and which patients will not. With this study, UF researchers led by Catherine Price, Ph.D., associate professor of clinical and health psychology and anesthesiology, have begun to provide some answers… Continue reading.

Mingzhou Ding, Pruitt Family Professor in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been invited to join the editorial board of The Journal of Neuroscience as an associate editor.

Dr. Ding was selected by the senior and reviewing editors of the journal based on his expertise and history of reviews. As an associate editor, he will provide frequent reviews as well as suggest appropriate reviewers for manuscripts. Appointment as associate editors are initially for three years and requires approval by the Scientific Publications Committee of the Society for Neuroscience.

Congratulations to Dr. Mingzhou Ding who has been appointed a member of the Editorial Board for Scientic Reports, a journal from Nature Publishing Group, the publishers of Nature. 

Scientific Reports launched in 2011 as a multidisciplinary, online-only, open access publication covering all areas of the natural sciences. All research papers benefit from rapid peer review and publication and, through the open access publishing model, are available to the entire scientific community. Nature Publishing Group brings 140 years of experience in the communication and publication of scientific research to the open access arena. Scientific Reports uses the tools, technology and experience of Nature Publishing Group, to provide our authors with improved service, visibility and functionality.

Throbbing pain may pound like a heartbeat, but University of Florida scientists have discovered the sensation is all in your head, or more precisely, in your brain waves.

The finding could drastically change how researchers look for therapies that can ease pain, said Dr. Andrew Ahn, a neurologist at the UF College of Medicine, a part of UF Health. Ahn and his colleagues reported their findings in the July issue of the journal Pain…

…Ahn and his colleagues Jue Mo and Mingzhou Ding in the UF College of Engineering along with Morris Maizels of the Blue Ridge Headache Center in Asheville, N.C., examined a patient who had a throbbing sensation that remained even after her chronic migraine headaches had resolved. They simultaneously recorded the patient’s sensation of the throbbing pain and her arterial pulse and found that they differed from one another, indicating that the pulsing of blood from the heartbeat was unrelated to the throbbing quality of pain.

However, through the use of an electroencephalogram, they found that the throbbing quality was correlated with a type of brain activity called alpha waves.

“Struggling to concentrate” isn’t just a saying. Engineers are now able to see the way two networks in the brain battle for control when you need to focus.

Congratulations to Dr. Mingzhou Ding who was one of thirty-four faculty named UF Research Foundation Professors for 2013!

“The recognition goes to faculty who have a distinguished current record of research and a strong research agenda that is likely to lead to continuing distinction in their fields.”

Professor Ding’s research is focused on understanding the neural basis of higher brain functions and their impairments by neurological and psychiatric disorders. He has pioneered the application of computational and statistical techniques to assess the directionality of neural interactions and information flow in brain networks.  In particular, he and his lab are applying quantitative engineering approaches to multiple forms of imaging data for the brain (e.g., electroencephalogram, electrocorticogram, fMRI data) to address fundamental questions in the dynamic organization of brain networks and the disruption of these networks in disease.

We’ve all been there: You’re at work deeply immersed in a project when suddenly you start thinking about your weekend plans. It happens because behind the scenes, parts of your brain are battling for control.

Now, University of Florida researchers and their colleagues are using a new technique that allows them to examine how parts of the brain battle for dominance when a person tries to concentrate on a task. Addressing these fluctuations in attention may help scientists better understand many neurological disorders such as autism, depression and mild cognitive impairment.

Mingzhou Ding, a professor of biomedical engineering, and Xiaotong Wen, an assistant research scientist of biomedical engineering, both of the University of Florida; Yijun Liu of the McKnight Brain Institute of the University of Florida and Peking University, Beijing; and Li Yao of Beijing Normal University, report their findings in the current issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

UF BME Professor Mingzhou Ding has edited a newly published book, The Dynamic Brain, by Oxford Press. His co-editor is Dr. Dennis Glanzman, the Program Chief of the Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Program at the National Institute of Mental Health. This carefully edited volume, with contributions from leading researchers around the world, is the first to fully attack the problem of variability in the brain’s activity as an indicator of its dynamic nature and not just as noise to be ignored. It will be of great value to a generation of researchers.