Steve Smith

Registration is now open for the 2026 FSL Course.

22-26 June, in Bordeaux (the week after OHBM).

open.oxcin.ox.ac.uk/pages/fslcou...

Finally signs of spring! Last night, first sighting of Great Crested Newts - 6 large adults heading down to the pond (iphone photo not great, but you can see the male's white tail stripe and the crest flopped down along the back), and today the geese arrived for the summer.

✅ The UK Government has today granted access to half a million UK Biobank participants' coded GP data for health research.

This change will dramatically increase the power of UK Biobank's dataset to advance the diagnosis, treatment and management of conditions handled by GPs.

I'm still confused about the *real* @holland-tom.bsky.social talking about "house cows" all the time.

Save the date! FSL Course 2026 is provisionally planned in-person​ for June 22nd - 26th in Bordeaux, France. More details and the registration link will be posted on the FSL Course website soon.
open.oxcin.ox.ac.uk/pages/fslcou...

three owl species that we saw near Chambal, India

One lovely day in the middle of a cold, grey, wet week. Pond is semi-frozen, sun is shining on the pollarded willows who are growing back red. A few bullrushes are starting to go to seed.

My new gig is PI of the CANN group at Trinity College Dublin and University of Oxford (50/50). Funded by the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, we'll be recruiting postdocs, PhDs and an RA in Dublin and Oxford soon. So exciting! @oxcin.bsky.social @tcddublin.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk @tcdscss.bsky.social

Hey Siri, can you remove the scaffolding. But seriously, even with bits of scaffolding, this is the most beautiful building I've seen.

Just got back from India - amazing wonderful country. Some pictures from the "Baby Taj" in Agra.

Easy and quick to use on the UKB RAP. Getting a local copy of one sub-modality from the central store takes a few minutes. Regression across 82K subjects and 2M voxels takes between a few seconds and a couple of hours.

Plus a tool for easy voxelwise cross-subject regression against variables such as genetics and lifestyle factors.

Also a highly efficient supervoxel version of the data - much smaller and faster to work with, but in general losing no signal or spatial detail, while also denoising.

Preprint on PANDORA by Aslan Abivardi:

A massive archive of UK Biobank brain imaging from 82K subjects. For each of 98 sub-modalities (e.g., FA from dMRI), the images are collated into a convenient subjectsXvoxels HDF5 file.

pages.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/pandora/web/

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

photo or it didn't happen !
:-)

Imaging-friendly docker for UK Biobank RAP An Easy Docker for Brain Imaging Visualisation on UKB RAP Paul McCarthy1 Stephen Smith1 1FMRIB, OxCIN, NDCN, Oxford University, UK Queries: email paul.mccarthy@ndcn.ox.ac.uk and stephen.smith@ndcn....

For people using the @ukbiobank.bsky.social UKB RAP cloud system for brain imaging analyses:

In order to make RAP much easier to use, we have created a Docker which is easy to install and gives you a graphical desktop, FSLeyes and the HCP wb_view.

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I would consider Aperture Neuro as the next choice?

Hi Micah,

I.N. editors apply same "thresholds" as we *used to* at old journal, but average submissions have improved, so triage rates are lower than they used to be. At I.N. the breakdown is:

43% accept
18% reject resubmit
11% reject after review
29% triage (including 4% triage too-clinical)

HI Maria - here are some *average* timings at Imaging Neuroscience (of course any individual paper will vary):

- 62 days from initial submission to first major revision decision

- Sending paper to production to final version appearing online: 16 days (includes author proofing time)

Merry Wyfe - A cider washed rind cheese - Bath Soft Cheese The Merry Wyfe - An award-winning washed-rind cheese made with our Wyfe of Bath curds which are pressed and then washed in cider every other day for four weeks

(with apologies to non-UK folks) - we just discovered this *amazing* cheese - semi-hard, with a taste that is a confusingly incredible combination of being both subtle and yet rich and complex.

parkfarm.co.uk/products/mer...

I often think about the fact that all the universities in 🇨🇦 together did not produce 11 Nobel Prizes in that period (or since). Not from a lack of brilliance, but from a lack of steady funding and the insistence on significant teaching loads and mind-numbing committee memberships for all faculty.

I think your scanner's A2D scaling is set a little high :-)

We had published a similar plot in the early UKB brain imaging paper from @fmrib-karla.bsky.social - so this is just a quick update on that. My how the y axis has grown up!

www.nature.com/articles/nn....

Yes and maybe:

It's easy to screen them out (ignore those associations) given that all the non-brain-imaging variables are organised into nice categories.

One might also want to include body size variables as confounds, (though we do by default already use overall head size as a confound).

Latest processing of UK Biobank brain imaging data - now with 82,000 usable first-scan datasets. Correlating brain IDPs with 13,000 non-imaging variables gives a rich manhattan-stye plot. 324,000 Bonferroni-significant associations.

‘Business-as-usual’ offers from publishers raise walk-away fears Disappointing offers which ‘miss financial reality’ faced by UK higher education have heightened speculation that institutions will ditch proposed deals

Many UK universities likely to walk away from journal agreements after publishers put forward proposals with “year-on-year price rises” rather than cheaper deals demanded by national negotiators, @davidprosser.bsky.social tells @jgro-the.bsky.social www.timeshighereducation.com/news/busines...

Where is the money going? In the case of for-profit publishers it's very clear:

Your open access fees fund corporate profit margins.

Profit margins for large academic publishers can far exceed those of household names like Amazon and Apple.

chart source: bit.ly/4leULKi
#scipub #academicsky

How about if the journal inserts a hidden message into a paper sent for review, with instructions to the LLM to write a coded message in the review, so the journal can tell if LLM was used by the reviewer?

Congratulations to Holly Schofield and @curlyryes.bsky.social for being chosen from over 350 papers that were published by @imagingneurosci.bsky.social in 2024.

Holly accepted the award at OHBM in Brisbane and Ryan celebrated the win from Dublin!

www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/scienti...

Indeed - and apparently I'm only allowed to view the award from three pre-specified angles.
:-)