Portrait de Danilo Bzdok

Danilo Bzdok

Membre académique principal
Chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR
Professeur agrégé, McGill University, Département de génie biomédicale
Sujets de recherche
Apprentissage profond
Biologie computationnelle
Grands modèles de langage (LLM)
Traitement du langage naturel

Biographie

Danilo Bzdok est informaticien et médecin de formation. Il possède une double formation unique en neurosciences systémiques et en algorithmes d'apprentissage automatique. Après une formation à l'Université d'Aix-la-Chapelle (RWTH) (Allemagne), à l'Université de Lausanne (Suisse) et à la Harvard Medical School (États-Unis), il a obtenu un doctorat en neurosciences du Centre de recherche de Jülich (Allemagne) et un doctorat en informatique dans le domaine des statistiques d'apprentissage automatique à l'INRIA Saclay et à NeuroSpin (Paris, France). Il est actuellement professeur agrégé à la Faculté de médecine de l'Université McGill et titulaire d’une chaire en IA Canada-CIFAR à Mila – Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle. Son activité de recherche interdisciplinaire est centrée sur la réduction des lacunes dans la connaissance des bases cérébrales des types de pensée qui définissent l'être humain, afin de découvrir les principes clés de conception computationnelle qui sous-tendent l'intelligence humaine.

Étudiants actuels

Publications

Paired neuronal-haemodynamic neurovascular coupling measures and cognitive performance in vascular pathology: protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis
V. D. Abramova
Marta Estrada
Veronica Egovtseva
Ksenya Pronyaeva
Rustam Talybov
Taleb M. Almansoori
Mohammad I. K. Hamad
Milos Ljubisavljevic
Yauhen Statsenko
Abstract Background Neurovascular coupling (NVC) links neuronal activity to haemodynamic responses. Altered NVC may contribute to cognitive … (voir plus)impairment in vascular pathology, but evidence is limited by inconsistent definitions and by the conflation of paired neuronal–haemodynamic NVC measures with haemodynamic-only, model-derived, or imaging-derived proxy measures. Aim and objectives The primary aim is to evaluate the association between paired neuronal–haemodynamic NVC measures and cognitive performance in middle-aged and older adults with vascular pathology. Secondarily, we will compare paired neuronal–haemodynamic NVC measures between patients with vascular pathology and age-matched controls without vascular pathology, determine whether predefined pathology strata show distinct impairment profiles, and examine whether the NVC–cognition association varies across cognitive domains. As an exploratory objective, we will synthesise evidence on the prognostic utility of paired neuronal–haemodynamic NVC measures in predicting future cognitive decline. Collectively, these objectives address critical gaps in a fragmented literature characterised by heterogeneous methodologies, populations, and assessment techniques, as well as methodological limitations including small samples, cross-sectional designs, and inadequate confounder control. This review will systematically synthesise existing findings, identify remaining knowledge gaps, and outline priorities for future research. Methods and analysis This protocol follows PRISMA-P guidance and is registered with PROSPERO (CRD420261351976). We searched five electronic databases from inception to 28 July 2026 for peer-reviewed English-language studies. Eligible studies include middle-aged and older adults with vascular pathology and/or participants from relevant comparator groups and report paired neuronal–haemodynamic NVC measures based on independently acquired neuronal and haemodynamic or vascular signals. The primary synthesis will evaluate associations between paired neuronal–haemodynamic NVC measures and cognitive performance, with meta-analysis conducted only for synthesis strata that meet prespecified feasibility criteria.
Mapping Alzheimer’s neuropathology signatures to the whole brain transcriptome using machine learning data-fusion
L. M. Hodgson
David A Bennett
Elisabeth B. Binder
Abstract In Alzheimer’s disease (AD), misfolded proteins emerge across the entire brain in structured, yet not rigid, spatiotemporal patte… (voir plus)rns. Yet, a systematic bias of single-cell genomics toward sampling mostly cortical tissue limits our understanding of the whole-brain transcriptomic vulnerability to AD. Here, we develop a machine learning method to extrapolate local AD neuropathology signatures to the whole brain. By analyzing gene expression profiles of over two million cortical cells from 427 humans spanning the AD-pathology spectrum, we derive transcriptomic estimators of AD neuropathology. After extensive validations on datasets with known ground truth, we apply this framework to three million cells from 108 brain regions in the Siletti whole human brain atlas and derive an anticipated brain map of transcriptomic signatures indexing AD neuropathology. This interrogation of regions spanning the cortical, subcortical, and brainstem structures uncovers transcriptomic signatures associated with hyperphosphorylated tau in the medulla oblongata, dorsal raphe nucleus, and the tuberal and mammillary regions of the hypothalamus. At the cellular level, assessments of these signatures across 31 cell populations identify VGLUT1/2 expressing neurons, astrocytes, and microglia as key neuropathology-resembling populations. Within the hippocampus, pathology signatures surface in the rostral cornu ammonis (CA) subfields, particularly in the CA1 pyramidal neurons and dentate granule cells. β-amyloid-like signatures localize to the neocortex with laminar selectivity — most prominently in upper layer somatostatin+ intratelencephalic neurons (L2-L3), but also in deep layer intratelencephalic and corticothalamic neurons (L5-L6). Neocortical astrocytes and microglia exhibiting disease associated signatures similarly demonstrate a unique laminar preference. Together, this study provides the first whole human brain map of AD pathology-associated transcriptomic signals, and exposes cell type, region, and cortex layer specific vulnerabilities.
Cortical microstructural integrity predicts an exploitation bias in older adulthood
Patrick Hewan
Alfie Wearn
Jeremy Hogeveen
Kayla Williams
R Nathan Spreng
Gary R. Turner
Sylvia Villeneuve
Judes Poirier
John C S Breitner
Sylvain Baillet
Andrée-Ann Baril
Bellec Pierre
Véronique Bohbot
Mallar Chakravarty
D Louis Collins
Mahsa Dadar
Simon Ducharme
Alan Evans
Claudine Gauthier … (voir 80 de plus)
Maiya R Geddes
Rick Hoge
Yasser Ituria‐Medina
Gerhard Multhaup
Lisa-Marie Münter
Natasha Rajah
Pedro Rosa-Neto
Taylor Schmitz
Soucy Jp
Nathan Spreng
Christine Tardif
Etienne Vachon-Presseau
Mohammadali Javanray
Meishan Ai
Philippe Amouyel
Nicholas Ashton
Gabriel Aumont‐Rodrigue
Julie Bailly
Guilia Baracchini
Kaj Blennow
Christian Bocti
Lianne Boisvert
Sophie Boutin
Ann Brinkmalm Westman
A P Dagher
Xing Dai
Samir Das
Marina Dauar‐Tedeschi
Louis De Beaumont
Christine Déry
Maxime Descoteaux
Elena Drobotea
M Elie
Alfonso Fajardo Valdez
Vladimir Fonov
David Morgan
Jonathan Gallago
Greco Cr
Louise Hudon
Gabriel Jean
Anne Labonté
Robert Laforce
Marc Lalancette
Jean-Charles Lambert
Jeannie‐Marie Leoutsakos
Danaé Lussier Dumouchel
B Misic
Béry Mohammediyan
Holly NewboldFox
Eugenia Nita Capota
Alix Noly‐Gandon
Adrian Eduardo Noriega de la Colina
Pierre Orban
Valentin Ourry
Cynthia Picard
Alexa Pichet Binette
A. L. Poirier
Nathalie Prenevost
Ting Qiu
Marc James Quesnel
Charles Ramassamy
Jean‐Michel Raoult
Jordana Remz
Safa Sanami
Frederic St‐Onge
Cherie Strikwerda‐Brown
Elisabeth Sylvain
Andràs Tikàsz
Christina Tremblay
Stefanie Tremblay
Jennifer Tremblay‐Mercier
Stéphanie Tullo
Irem Ulku
Paolo Vitali
Yara Yakoub
Robert Zatorre
Henrik Zetterberg
Pierre Bellec
Jean-Paul Soucy
Claudia Greco
OBJECTIVES: Prefrontal regions are implicated in explore-exploit decision-making during foraging. Older adults often show an exploitation bi… (voir plus)as, and this age period is also marked by deteriorating prefrontal myelination. To investigate whether these phenomena are linked, we examined whether lower magnetization transfer saturation (MTsat), a myelin-sensitive quantitative MRI (qMRI) measure, in these regions predicts greater exploitation bias during foraging, and whether cortical microstructure is a better predictor of bias than macrostructure (i.e., cortical thickness). METHODS: Cognitively healthy older adults with familial risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) (N=118, 60-88 years) completed a foraging task indexing explore-exploit decision-making. qMRI was used to derive MTsat values for the frontopolar cortex (FPC), medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), rostral middle frontal gyrus (rMFG), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), as well as the locus coeruleus (LC), a core subcortical region strongly implicated in explore-exploit decision-making. Secondary analyses examined associations between available AD risk markers and foraging. RESULTS: Lower MTsat in the FPC, OFC, rMFG, and LC was associated with an exploitation bias, with LC and FPC emerging as the strongest predictors. No relationship was observed for the dACC. MTsat remained a significant predictor of foraging after controlling for cortical thickness. Observed associations were largely unrelated to AD risk markers. DISCUSSION: Individual differences in cortical microstructural integrity within a well-defined explore-exploit circuit are associated with an exploitative decision-making bias in older adults. These findings highlight the value of qMRI microstructural integrity markers, beyond standard macrostructural assays, in characterizing the neural correlates of exploitation biases in later life.
The topology of adolescent mental health
Maria B. Jelen
Alexa Mousley
Kayson Fakhar
Estherina Trachtenberg
Yuankai He
Robert Kohler
Varun Warrier
Sarah W. Yip
Duncan E. Astle
Abstract The increased vulnerability to mental health problems in adolescence is frequently reported but poorly understood, hampered by a ri… (voir plus)gid diagnostic system which fails to capture intertwining symptoms and only loosely aligns with biological axes of variability. Here, we reconceptualised the mental health symptoms of young adolescents in the ABCD cohort (N=11862) as a latent topology of overlapping symptom dimensions, using an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to establish how transdiagnostic dimensions co-occur and overlap within individuals. Combining this with a novel classification approach, we delineated zones within this landscape, within which specific profiles of symptoms were robustly represented. These data-driven profiles were leveraged to establish associated resting-state functional connectivity and genetic characteristics. In doing so we recaptured the commonly reported p- factor axis as well as further symptom-subtype dimensions. Gene ontology analysis revealed that shared neurobiological and cellular mechanisms embedded in both the genome and transcriptome may confer risk for psychopathology.
Parent-of-origin effects in Alzheimer’s liability dissociate neurocognitive and cardiovascular traits in at-risk individuals
Frederic St‐Onge
Sylvia Villeneuve
AmanPreet Badhwar
Sarah A. Gagliano Taliun
Sali Farhan
Maiya Geddes
Yasser Iturria Medina
Judes Poirier
R. Nathan Spreng
Alzheimer's disease (AD) has a higher prevalence in women than men and is more frequently inherited from mothers than fathers. Yet, while ne… (voir plus)uroimaging and biomarker studies link maternal family history to stronger AD-related alterations, epidemiological studies suggest that paternal history confers comparable or even greater risk. Here, we leverage the deeply profiled PREVENT-AD cohort to derive three intermediate phenotypes of AD susceptibility. Drawing on nearly 1,000 individual study visits, we quantify how these intermediate phenotypes vary as a function of maternal versus paternal AD lineage. We show that lineage-specific differentiation, including both maternal and paternal biases, is reflected in the brain structure and phenome of adult children of AD patients. Cognitive and cardiovascular risk markers, together with associated genetic variants, show the strongest differentiation along the parental-lineage spectrum of disease susceptibility relative to other correlates of AD burden. Our cross-generational analysis ultimately delineates multidimensional parent-of-origin effects in AD genealogy.
The blueprint of human functional architecture shifts from cognition to anatomy during perturbations of consciousness
Andrea I. Luppi
Dragana Manasova
Justine Y. Hansen
Zhen-Qi Liu
Asa Farahani
Yonatan Sanz Perl
Jakub Vohryzek
Daniel Golkowski
Andreas Ranft
R. Ilg
Denis Jordan
Vincent Bonhomme
Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse
Athéna Demertzi
Océane Jaquet
Mohamed Ali Bahri
Naji Alnagger
Paolo Cardone
Lorina Naci
Adrian M. Owen … (voir 9 de plus)
John Pickard
Guy Williams
Judith Allanson
Enrico Amico
Jacobo Sitt
David Menon
Emmanuel A. Stamatakis
Bratislav Misic
Consciousness and cognition arise from the ongoing interactions between brain regions. Synchronous fluctuations of fMRI signals may indicate… (voir plus) that two brain regions perform similar cognitive functions, but neural interactions are also constrained by anatomical connectivity and regions' molecular, cytoarchitectonic, and metabolic profiles. Here we disentangle the respective contributions of ongoing cognition and multimodal neurobiological constraints in shaping functional connectivity. We jointly contextualise haemodynamic FC against eight distinct multimodal representations of the human connectome: (i) structural connectivity from diffusion tractography; (ii) spatial embedding; (iii) similarity of transcriptional profiles from gene expression; (iv) similarity of receptor profiles from Positron Emission Tomography; (v) laminar profile similarity from histology; (vi) correlated electrophysiological activity from magnetoencephalography; (vii) correlated metabolic activity from PET glucose uptake; (viii) coordinated activation across 123 cognitive operations from the NeuroSynth meta-analytic engine. We demonstrate that cognitive co-activation is the dominant predictor of inter-regional fMRI synchrony in the awake human brain, even when quantified using intracranial electrical stimulation. Crucially, this predominance of cognitive co-activation for shaping functional connectivity is systematically obliterated across five datasets of pharmacological and pathological perturbations of consciousness (chronic disorders of consciousness; anaesthesia with sevoflurane, propofol, or ketamine) when cognition is disconnected from the environment or altogether abolished. Altogether, we show that multimodal predictors of functional architecture shift away from cognitive co-activation and toward anatomical-molecular constraints during pharmacological and pathological perturbations of consciousness.
Danilo Bzdok
Cell type transcriptomic modules reveal shared molecular mechanisms in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease
Edward A. Fon
Alain Dagher
Yasser Iturria-Medina
Jo Anne Stratton
L. M. Hodgson
David A Bennett
Historically, Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) have been investigated as two distinct disorders of the brain. However, … (voir plus)a few similarities in neuropathology and clinical symptoms have been documented over the years. Traditional single-gene centric studies, such as differential gene expression analyses, have struggled to unravel the molecular basis for the observed pathological links between AD and PD. To address this, we tailor a latent factor framework to analyze synchronous gene co-expression at sub-cell-type resolution. Utilizing large, single-nucleus transcriptomics datasets in AD (70,634 nuclei) and PD (340,902 nuclei) from postmortem human brains, we systematically extract and juxtapose disease-critical molecular signatures in the brain. Our transcriptomic analysis reveals shared molecular programs between AD and PD that systematically localize to specific glial and neuronal cell types. In neurons, convergent gene groups in AD and PD relate to cytoskeletal dynamics and mitochondrial stress mechanisms. Similarly, overlapping gene groups in microglia modules implicate T cell activation mechanisms and synapse pruning pathways. In parallel, AD- and PD-associated genes in astrocytes are involved in heavy metal processing; oligodendrocytes highlight convergent dysregulation in myelin synthesis. In addition, our analysis reveals APOE, an AD GWAS gene, has disease predictive roles in PD-associated gene modules. Conversely, SNCA, a PD GWAS gene, emerges within AD associated gene modules. Our multi-module sub-cell-type approach offers unique insights into the molecular basis of shared neuropathology in AD and PD.
Widespread use of invalid statistical tests in biomedical machine learning
Tianchu Zeng
Hui Li
Shaoshi Zhang
Yan Quan Tan
Fang Tian
Csaba Orbán
Lijun An
Wanyu Che
Jingwen Cheng
Joanna Su Xian Chong
Niousha Dehestani
Zijian Dong
Xin Li
Zhizhou Li
Mervyn Jun Rui Lim
Yi Lin
Qinrui Ling
Zijie Ling
Xi Zhi Low
Sina Mansour L. … (voir 24 de plus)
Kwun Kei Ng
Thuan Tinh Nguyen
Leon Qi Rong Ooi
Shreya Pande
Xing Qian
Jingxuan Ruan
Z WANG
Yapei Xie
Chen Zhang
Yichi Zhang
K Patil
Linden Parkes
Elvisha Dhamala
Sidhant Chopra
Andrew Zalesky
Avram Holmes
S Eickhoff
Juan Helen Zhou
Olivier Renaud
Nico Dosenbach
Konrad P. Kording
Thomas Nichols
B T Thomas Yeo
Abstract Machine learning is accelerating biomedical research. Cross-validation is widely used to compare predictive performance – not onl… (voir plus)y to benchmark algorithms, but also to inform scientific applications, such as ranking biomarkers. However, prediction performance estimates across cross-validation folds are not independent. Standard tests for comparing prediction performance (e.g., paired t-test) assume independence and can therefore inflate false positive rates. In a PRISMA-guided meta-analysis of 210 studies (impact factor ≥15, 1 June 2020 – 1 June 2025), we find that 97% ignored fold dependence when comparing prediction performance. This problem is ubiquitous across scientific fields and unaffected by impact factor, rigor-promoting policies, or open science practices. Simulations across 420 scenarios spanning four diverse datasets show that ignoring fold dependence leads to invalid false positive control in most settings. Repeated cross-validation further compounds this problem, with false positive rates rising toward 100% as the number of repetitions grows. Existing fold-dependence-aware tests rely on strong assumptions because the variance of fold-level statistics and the between-fold correlation cannot be disentangled under standard cross-validation. We therefore propose the SHARP (Split-HAlf RePeated) test, a simple modification to standard cross-validation that enables direct estimation of variance and correlation. Benchmarked against 12 tests, SHARP provides the best overall balance of false-positive control, statistical power, and confidence-interval calibration across simulation schemes. We conclude by providing best practices and reporting guidelines for valid model comparison inference in biomedical machine learning and beyond.
Profiling the Cell-Type Specific Effects of Psilocybin in Medial Prefrontal Cortexh
Heike Schuler
Delong Zhou
Vedrana Cvetkovska
Yiu-Chung Tse
Juliet Meccia
Rosemary C. Bagot
Neurovascular Coupling as Early, High-Sensitive Biomarker for Cognitive Decline and Vascular Pathology: Protocol for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
V. D. Abramova
Veronika Egovtseva
Ksenya Pronyaeva
Shamsa H. Alshamsi
Marta Estrada
Rustam Talybov
Taleb~M. Almansoori
Bassem Sadek
Mohammed Khogali
Mohammad~I.K. Hamad
Milos Ljubisavljevic
Yauhen Statsenko
An international mega-analysis of psychedelic drug effects on brain circuit function
Manesh Girn
Manoj K. Doss
Leor Roseman
Katrin H. Preller
Fernanda Palhano-Fontes
Lorenzo Pasquini
Frederick S. Barrett
Pablo Mallaroni
Natasha L. Mason
Christopher Timmermann
Drummond E. McCulloch
Patrick M. Fisher
Brian S. Winston
Flora Moujaes
Felix Muller
Matthias E. Liechti
Franz X. Vollenweider
Johannes G. Ramaekers
Kim Kuypers
Draulio B. Araujo … (voir 7 de plus)
Olaf Sporns
Joshua Siegel
Nico Dosenbach
David J. Nutt
Robin L. Carhart-Harris
Emmanuel A. Stamatakis
Psychedelic drugs are re-emerging as promising scientific and clinical tools. However, despite a rapidly expanding literature on their thera… (voir plus)peutic value, the neural mechanisms underlying psychedelic effects remain unclear. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of acute psychedelic effects, conducted independently by several research groups, have so far yielded fragmented and sometimes inconsistent findings. Here, to help facilitate greater convergence, we conducted a 'mega-analysis' integrating 11 independent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets across five psychedelic drugs (psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide, mescaline, N,N-dimethyltryptamine and ayahuasca) from research groups spanning three continents and five countries. By applying a uniform preprocessing pipeline and a Bayesian hierarchical modeling framework, we discovered several common features in the induced alterations to brain function across drugs and sites. Most prominently, we identified a core signature of increased functional connectivity between transmodal (default, frontoparietal and limbic) and unimodal networks (visual and somatomotor), with subnetwork specificity. Furthermore, key subcortical regions (thalamus, caudate and putamen) and the cerebellum exhibited altered coupling with sensorimotor networks. In contrast to several single-site reports, Bayesian modeling revealed weak-to-moderate and selective reductions in within-network functional connectivity, with substantial variability across drugs and networks. Together, these findings extend past work by demonstrating that psychedelics reconfigure large-scale cortical organization while selectively engaging subcortical circuitry. This study provides the most comprehensive synthesis of psychedelic brain action to date, helping resolve inconsistencies and offering a probabilistic map of how psychedelics alter large-scale brain organization. We hereby provide a cornerstone to benchmark and shepherd future psychedelic neuroimaging research.