Welcome to my website!

My name is Xin Di (邸新 in Chinese). I am currently a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology. My research interest is mainly on understanding of brain connectivity and brain network organizations using brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). I develop computational models to measure brain connectivity in different mental conditions, such as during cognitive tasks and watching movies. I am also interested in applying the methods to understand brain development and aging, as well as mental conditions such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

I am currently an Associate Editor for Frontiers Brain Imaging Methods section after I have served for five years as a Review Editor. Over the past 10 years, I have reviewed more than 170 papers for scientific journals, including Nature Communications, GigaScience, Cerebral Cortex, Neuroimage, Human Brain Mapping, Scientific Data, Neurobiology of Aging, PLOS Computational Biology, Neuroinformatics, and many more. I have been awarded as Top reviewers in Neuroscience by Publons in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

For more about me, please see my CV.

News

• July 24, 2020: Our latest paper is finally out after almost two years of review process. In this paper, we explained the psychophysiological interaction (PPI) method and its relation to beta series correlation.
• March 31, 2020: I become an Associate Editor for Frontiers Brain Imaging Methods section. See my Frontiers editorial contributions here.

Selected publications

Working papers

Di X, Biswal BB (2020): Dissecting individual differences in responses to naturalistic stimuli in functional MRI: effects of development and gender. bioRxiv; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.01.073163

Di X, Woelfer M, Kuhn SB, Zhang Z, Biswal BB (2019): Estimations of the weather effects on brain functions using functional MRI - a cautionary tale. bioRxiv; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/646695

Recently published papers

Di X, Zhang Z, Biswal BB (2020): Understanding psychophysiological interaction and its relations to beta series correlation. Brain Imaging Behav. doi:10.1007/s11682-020-00304-8

Di X, Biswal BB (2020): Intersubject consistent dynamic connectivity during natural vision revealed by functional MRI. Neuroimage. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116698

Most cited papers

Di X, Gohel S, Kim EH and Biswal BB (2013). Task vs. Rest - Different Network Configurations between the Coactivation and the Resting-State Brain Networks. Front Hum Neurosci. 7:493.

Di X, Biswal BB, Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (2012). Metabolic Brain Covariant Networks as Revealed by FDG-PET with reference to resting-state fMRI networks. Brain Connect 2(5):275-83.

Here I post some codes that were used in our published studies.

Codes for Di and Biswal (2017) in Front Neurosci

It contains the codes for simulation of the correlations of PPI (psychophysiological interaction) between two different ways of calculations, and the codes for calculating coefficient of variation using Bland and Altman’s method (Bland and Altman, 1996). THe codes are available from this project

Reference: Paper: Di X and Biswal BB (2017) Psychophysiological Interactions in a Visual Checkerboard Task: Reproducibility, Reliability, and the Effects of Deconvolution. Front. Neurosci. 11:573. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2017.00573

Codes for Di and Biswal (2017) in Cereb Cortex

It contains the codes for PPI (psychophysiological interaction) and beta series analyses on several large scale functional MRI data. The codes are available from Open Science Framework

Reference: Di X, Biswal BB (accepted). Toward Task Connectomics: Examining Whole-Brain Task Modulated Connectivity in Different Task Domains. Cereb Cortex.