Paul Thompson

Paul Thompson

@ptenigma.bsky.social

Neuroscientist, professor AI guided tour - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOORfzGjCTA ENIGMA guided tour - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNjP5nZsJyQ Diffusion MRI of Brain Diseases - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2jHFm0wcN0

1.5K followers1.3K following911 posts

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

Ok I made it to the Yorkshire Moors (it takes 3 days to get here from LA). Very green and 45 degrees cooler than LA. Will be back in LA on Thursday.

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

🌄CAN YOU see the sun set in reverse on a plane if you fly west fast enough? Took off ~1 min before sunset in Copenhagen on SAS541 to Manchester; to reverse it, need to fly west at v = 902 cos(ф) knots, where ф =55 deg North to ~509 kn. it does unset but most of the effect is from gaining altitude

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

After setting, the sun which reversed and rose again still had not set again 1 hour later as flight flew almost due west at 480 knots at ~35000 ft

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Nadine Parker
@nadineparker.bsky.social

Replying to @nadineparker.bsky.social

PRS derived from the largest genome-wide association study of BD to date outperformed subtype specific PRS. The strongest performance was for differentiating BD type I cases from controls where the BD PRS achieved and AUC of 0.7.

Paul Thompson reposted

Nadine Parker
@nadineparker.bsky.social

Replying to @nadineparker.bsky.social

MRS models combining both risk scores typically outperformed any individual risk score. The best MRS model performance was in differentiating BD type I cases from controls where an AUC of 0.74 was achieved. Notably, the IRS and PRS were uncorrelated with each other.

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

🔥🔥🔥Impressive how many mathematics books are in the RELAY news store at Paris CDG airport, including a comic book about the history of mathematics and 🤯 an explanation of the classification of equivalent knots using polynomials.

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

For those of you @MICCAI 2026 in Strasbourg, no sleeping in tomorrow or going to see the Cathedral... 🔥 be in Room Curie B at 8am sharp for Evelyn Deutscher and Emily Dennis's BrainWorks 2026 Workshop* 🧨 *yes I will give a talk 1030am in Room Curie B youtube.com/watch?v=hknx...

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

Air France has good WiFi! Very helpful for finishing a talk. 🔥MICCAI is in Strasbourg, I wish we could take the conference students to meet the Gamma calculus/stochastic PDE people across town! 🔥very famous city for mathematics, w Bakry/Emery discovering mind blowing results there for over 50 years

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

This paper looks like it would have been fairly annoying to write on a typewriter* *for those born this century, it was a machine where you didn't need a printer, as you were the printer :)

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

Wonderful to catch up with Professor Liang Zhan today who gave an incredible talk on about 10 extremely challenging problems in 30 minutes (!). In one ingenious paper, PACE [1], developed with Alex Leow, detects hierarchical communities in functional MRI by repeatedly splitting the brain network..->

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Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

are represented as spins pointing up or down, and interactions favour either alignment or opposition. PACE applies the same idea to brain networks so that consistently positive fMRI correlations favour placing regions together, but consistently negative correlations favour placing them apart.

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

So then you can re-cast the puzzle of finding brain communities as finding a low-energy arrangement of interacting spins. you can use normalised mutual information to measure how much 2 community partitions agree, +find disease effects (by permutation test). [1] pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.govThe significance of negative correlations in brain connectivityUnderstanding the modularity of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-derived brain networks or “connectomes” can inform the study of brain function organization. However, fMRI connectomes addi...
Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

Wonderful to catch up with Professor Liang Zhan today who gave an incredible talk on about 10 extremely challenging problems in 30 minutes (!). In one ingenious paper, PACE [1], developed with Alex Leow, detects hierarchical communities in functional MRI by repeatedly splitting the brain network..->

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

...into groups with more consistently positive connections within groups and negative connections between them, testing if each successive split is statistically supported. This is interestingly related to the Ising model (1920) that comes up in the study of magnetism, where atoms...

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

I will teach scaling laws/crossover theory @MICCAI2026 as machine learning/CS papers often rank AI methods but the rank order depends on the training N, encoder dimension p + spectral slope of the data covariance. You can find the crossover with Gamma calculus-invented in Strasbourg where MICCAI is!

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

🔥Next talks (see you there!) 1⃣Sep 26 - Pepperdine University (New Directions in Generative and Diagnostic AI) 2⃣Sep 28/29 - NINDS/NIA Workshop on Parkinson's and Alzheimer's Disease 3⃣Oct 1 - MICCAI (Strasbourg) "Worldwide Collaboration, AI & Data Scaling Laws in the Quest to Map Human Brain Diseases"

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

🔥Making animations for a spectral theory lecture. Which is best? Claude (Opus 5 High)=on top, ChatGPT (Astra Medium)=on the bottom. 🔥 I slowed them down so there is time to make sense of the formulas

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

So I drove to a mysterious location in Venice this afternoon and there is a private home* set up like a TV studio to record the Dr Mark Hyman show. He is a very kind person, so much energy, creative and a bit of a maverick and ahead of this time in his views, a much more practical person than me.

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Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

He is 1000 times more productive than me, I think about math problems all day and all night with a sort of anxious obsessiveness, and in the same time he is testing new therapies, learning from people, digesting ideas, ,,

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

...writing books and developing new diagnostic tests and opportunities for people to join in. *a mile from our lab at the Marina, they flew in from Austin, Texas. Their team is very organised, very kind people.

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

So I drove to a mysterious location in Venice this afternoon and there is a private home* set up like a TV studio to record the Dr Mark Hyman show. He is a very kind person, so much energy, creative and a bit of a maverick and ahead of this time in his views, a much more practical person than me.

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

There will be a YouTube and Spotify podcast of our discussion of the causes and mechanisms of the major brain diseases, what brain scans can tells us, what are the pros and cons of some newly developed treatments, and where the science is going.

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

Apocalyptic double rainbow in the LA sky, rainbow #2 is 9 degrees outside the first one but colors are in reverse order (red at the smaller viewing angle (~50°) and violet at the larger one (~53°) due to 2 reflections inside each raindrop

Paul Thompson
@ptenigma.bsky.social

I'll be giving a Keynote Talk @ #MICCAI2026 in Strasbourg. 🔥But did you know French mathematicians Meyer, Bakry+Émery invented the Gamma-calculus in Strasbourg ~50 y ago ? 🔥Come see how the Strasbourg group's Gamma-calculus governs diagnostic classifier accuracy as training data gradually comes in!