A 2016 Roadmap Comes Full Circle

In 2016, I distilled my research during PhD study into a perspective paper Functional Neuroimaging in the New Era of Big Data. In that paper, I presented my vision for the next ten years in its Fig. 1: a roadmap built on two targets — turning neuroimaging big data into knowledge (discovery), and building better informatics systems scaled to such big data (sharing).

This year, that vision took a concrete step forward: we published our fMRI foundation model in Nature Biomedical Engineering, a milestone for scaling up neuroimaging in size, scope, and long-term impact.

From there, we launched NeuroDiscovery, an agentic AI harness that runs automatic, end-to-end neuroimaging research, continuously discovering knowledge from neuroimaging data 24/7.

And now the arc continues. As co-PI with Lifang He, and with the support from NIBIB, we’ll pursue full-lifecycle research on neuroimaging data analytics solutions — bringing that 2016 roadmap full circle, from discovery to sharing.