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Boston Children's Hospital · Harvard Medical School

Cohen Laboratory of Translational Neuroimaging

We use causal neuroimaging — brain lesions and pharmaco-fMRI — to map the circuits behind autism and ADHD symptoms, then pilot non-invasive neuromodulation (TMS and real-time fMRI neurofeedback) to support rapid clinical trials.

Explore our research Meet the team

  1. Map

    lesions & pharmaco-fMRI

  2. Validate

    in non-lesional patients

  3. Modulate

    TMS & neurofeedback

  4. Assess

    change in behavior

  5. Translate

    rapid clinical trials

An iterative loop — bedside to clinical trials, and back

From our work

All figures
FIGURE 5 | Comparison with control groups. The two‐sample t test between CNM of ADHD and psychiatric disorders (A) is largely nonsignificant, while the two‐sample t tests between two separate neurodegenerative disorder cohorts (B–C) largely reflect increased consistency in the two control cohorts. Comparison against lesion network mapping of acute stroke solely revealed the ACC (D), while comparison against a random set of atrophy studies was nonsignificant (E). For visual comparison, we show our CNM of ADHD one‐sample t test results (F, upper row) compared with the same analysis done with random coordinates (F, lower row). ADHD, attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder; CNM, coordinate network mapping; PALM, Permutation Analysis of Linear Models.

Annals of the Child Neurology Society · 2025

Coordinate Network Mapping of Focal Brain Volume Differences in ADHD Reveals Common Patterns That Lack Specificity: A Systematic Review

FIGURE 4 | Overview of lesion network mapping. All tuber voxels in totality for each patient were characterized as that patient's “lesion” (A) Permutation Analysis of Linear Models (PALM) was applied by comparing the functional connectivity between each lesion voxel against all other voxels in the brain of 1000 control participants from a connectome (B) while comparing with a measurement of interest, in this case ADOS subscores (C) The connectome used in this analysis was from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, comprised of functional connectivity measured from 1000 individuals aged 9–10 years (see acknowledgments for reference). At the completion of those comparisons, a lesion network map was constructed with t‐statistics on each brain voxel. Maps of p‐values after family‐wise error (FWE) and false‐detection rate (FDR) corrections were then overlayed onto the t‐map at p > 0.95 (D) When applying PALM to our cohort's lesions along the ADOS‐SA score, we found a region of interest in the R cerebellar crus V area with the anatomical view above and the cerebellar flatmap view below. Note that the process of flattening a NIFTI ROI involves averaging of values, and therefore the range of t‐values plotted here is different than the direct result of PALM. Alt text: Composite figure with first column showing tuber locations in example axial brain slices of three patients, second column showing the functional connectivity map of each patient's tubers, third column showing ADOS testing subscores for SA and RRB, and last column showing the cerebellar region of interest plotted in three dimensions as well as on a cerebellar flatmap.

Annals of the Child Neurology Society · 2025

Lesions associated with autism symptoms map to a cerebellar brain network in tuberous sclerosis complex

Fig. 3 | The pattern of the network derived using the activation peak as the seed is highly similar to that derived using the distributed activation map as the seed (spatial correlation r = 0.89 for the unthresholded network overlap map). a Activation peaks of the above three representative subjects from the HCP dataset. b The locations of the activation peaks across individual participants (N = 100) were highly heterogeneous, with only 8 out of the 100 activation peaks commonly located in the most convergent brain region. c However, these heterogeneous activation peaks were functionally connected to common set of brain regions. Notably, since the pattern of the activation peak overlap map (b) and activation network overlap map (Fig. 1c) are highly similar, it indicates that even though the location of the activation peaks are heterogeneous across participants, most of them are located in different parts of the same network derived from ANM analyses.

Communications Biology · 2024

Heterogenous brain activations across individuals localize to a common network

Research areas

Autism spectrum disorder

Localizing the circuits behind autism's core and associated symptoms — social communication, sensory differences, face processing — and testing targeted, non-invasive ways to modulate them.

ADHD & attention

Coordinate and lesion network mapping of attention, with pharmaco-fMRI and real-time fMRI neurofeedback to probe and modulate the circuits involved.

Tuberous sclerosis & epilepsy

Tubers, perinatal strokes, and epilepsy foci are natural experiments — focal anomalies that, when they share a symptom, reveal the responsible brain network.

Methods & open tools

Reproducible neuroimaging tools, BIDS-standard pipelines, and large-scale data harmonization — the open resources that make this work possible.

Recent work

All publications

  1. Lesion network mapping of focal injury-related aggression finds two distinct network injury patterns

    Miller GN , Lu Z , Peng S , Kletenik I , Ortega-Márquez J , Tripathy S , Wall J , Darby RR , Cohen AL

    Brain Communications · 2026

    Gillian Miller, BA Gillian Miller Zexia Lu, MS, BA Zexia Lu Shaoling Peng, PhD Shaoling Peng Isaiah Kletenik, MD Isaiah Kletenik Jorge Ortega Marquez, MD, MMSc Jorge Ortega Marquez Shreya Tripathy, BA Shreya Tripathy Juliana Wall Juliana Wall Alexander Li Cohen, MD, PhD Alexander Li Cohen
    Mentee-led Cohen first/senior Open access DOI Scholar

  2. Naturalistic movie viewing is an effective functional localizer of the fusiform face area in adolescents with and without autism

    Steeby CJ , Miller GN , Castro Palacin A , Cohen AL

    Imaging Neuroscience · 2026

    Clara Steeby, BS Clara Steeby Gillian Miller, BA Gillian Miller Alberto Castro Palacin, BS, MSc Alberto Castro Palacin Alexander Li Cohen, MD, PhD Alexander Li Cohen
    Mentee-led Cohen first/senior Open access DOI Scholar

  3. Comparison of Brain Normalization Software and Lesion Compensation Techniques in Chronic Perinatal Stroke Imaging

    Miller GN , Steeby CJ , Ortega-Marquez J , Palacin AC , Chui C , Alhadid K , Sullivan AW , Boes AD , Musolino PL , Cohen AL

    Imaging Neuroscience · 2025

    Gillian Miller, BA Gillian Miller Clara Steeby, BS Clara Steeby Jorge Ortega Marquez, MD, MMSc Jorge Ortega Marquez Alberto Castro Palacin, BS, MSc Alberto Castro Palacin Alexander Li Cohen, MD, PhD Alexander Li Cohen
    Mentee-led Cohen first/senior DOI Scholar

  4. Coordinate Network Mapping of Focal Brain Volume Differences in ADHD Reveals Common Patterns That Lack Specificity: A Systematic Review

    Wall J , Miller GN , Taylor JJ , Stubbs JL , Warfield SK , Cohen AL

    Annals of the Child Neurology Society · 2025

    Juliana Wall Juliana Wall Gillian Miller, BA Gillian Miller Alexander Li Cohen, MD, PhD Alexander Li Cohen
    Cited by 6 Mentee-led Cohen first/senior DOI Scholar

  5. Lesions associated with autism symptoms map to a cerebellar brain network in tuberous sclerosis complex

    Herman WX , Miller GN , Sahin M , Peters J , Warfield SK , Krueger DA , Bebin EM , Northrup H , Wu JY , Fox MD , Cohen AL , on behalf of the TACERN Group

    Annals of the Child Neurology Society · 2025

    Wendy Xiao Herman, MD, PhD Wendy Xiao Herman Gillian Miller, BA Gillian Miller Jurriaan M. Peters, MD, PhD Jurriaan M. Peters Alexander Li Cohen, MD, PhD Alexander Li Cohen
    Mentee-led Collaboration DOI Scholar

Life in the lab

Science is a team sport. Beyond the bench, we celebrate milestones, travel to conferences, and get out together — like this fall trip to the pumpkin patch.

Explore lab life
The Cohen Lab team at the pumpkin patch, fall 2025