Interests

Early on in my medical studies, I started to focus on child and adolescent psychiatry. In the context of my MD thesis, I then developed a broad interest into neurobiological processes involved in the development of psychiatric traits and disorders.

Often in clinical research, studies focus on only one specific aspect of a psychiatric trait, measured at a single time point in a heterogeneous patient group. To facilitate the transition from basic basic research to patient care, I think we need to recognize that

1. complex atypical behavior arises from interactions between multiple biological systems,
2. most psychiatric disorders do not occur suddenly, but may have their first origins in early neurodevelopment, and
3. atypical neurobiological processes that lead to similar atypical behavior may differ widely between individuals.

Integrative data acquisition and analysis approaches that try to incorporate this view might have the potential to move the field significantly forward.

In my PhD project at the INM-7 Biomarker Development group at Jülich Research Centre, Germany, I will use “normative modeling” approaches in large-scale multimodal neuroimaging, genetic, and behavioral datasets to map atypical neurobiological processes involved in the emergence of neurodevelopmental disorders. Specifically, I will study how macro-scale brain structure and function relates to underlying molecular and cellular level, how these relationships are shaped by (a)typical neurodevelopmental processes, and how they relate to behavioral, clinical, and genetic phenotypes.
The techniques applied will allow us to make predictions about single individuals from unseen cohorts, which we will use to evaluate their potential as diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers.

Preprints

Temporal dissociation between local and global functional adaptations of the maternal brain to childbirth: A longitudinal assessment

Chechko N, Nehls S, Losse E, Dukart J, Lotter LD (2023). bioRxiv

Human cortex development is shaped by molecular and cellular brain systems

Lotter LD, Saberi A, Hansen JY, Misic B, Paquola C, ..., IMAGEN Consortium, Nees F, Banaschewski T, Eickhoff SB, & Dukart J (2023). bioRxiv

Juspyce

A toolbox for flexible assessment of spatial associations between brain images

Spatial (alteration) patterns observed in MRI images may often reflect function and dysfunction of underlying biological systems. This applies alike to function and structure, on the surface or in the volumetric space, to typical activation patterns, or to maps of disordered brain function, for example obtained from patients compared to a reference cohort.
JuSpyce is a Python toolbox developed to address the question how brain images derived from different modalities colocalize with each other. It incorporates methods and ideas from the JuSpace, BrainSMASH, and neuromaps toolboxes. JuSpyce is especially suited for large-scale analyses trying to reveal how subject-level volumetric or surface neuroimaging data relates spatially to, e.g., nuclear imaging maps of neurotransmitter systems and brain metabolism or atlases of transcriptomic cell type markers. Being based on the the JuSpace toolbox, JuSpyce incorporates diverse univariate and multivariate statistical methods in processing-speed-optimized implementations embedded in a user friendly “pipeline-style” workflow. Take a look into the repository or get some impression of application scenarios in the first publication using the toolbox!

Abannotate

A toolbox for ensemble-based multimodal gene-category enrichment analysis of human neuroimaging data

ABAnnotate is a Matlab-based toolbox to perform ensemble-based gene-category enrichment analysis (GCEA) on volumetric human neuroimaging data via brain-wide gene expression patterns derived from the Allen Human Brain Atlas. It applies a nonparametric method developed by Fulcher et al. (2021) using spatial autocorrelation-corrected phenotype null maps for the estimation of gene-category null ensembles.
Effectively, with ABAnnotate you can answer the question: “Is my brain map of interest spatially related to, e.g., a certain neuronal cell type?”. All you have to do is put your brain map into a minimum of three lines of Matlab code, choose the GCEA dataset (e.g., cell types) that interests you and run the toolbox. What you get is a set of association scores and nonparametric corrected p values associating your brain map with each GCEA category (e.g., cell type). Read more in the repository, in this example case, or our recent publication for which the toolbox was initially developed.

Set you free

Automated structured literature searches across multiple databases

Set You Free is a GUI-based literature search engine that runs locally in your browser. After having defined search criteria, you can perform literature searches across multiple databases and preprint servers with open access APIs, search for cross references based on the resulting records, select your records of interests manually, and export the results to advanced tools like Rayyan or CADIMA. Set You Free also performs automatic duplicate detection and screening for publications from predatory journals. Interested? Check out the repository!

Publications

Sex-dependent clinical presentation, body image, and endocrine status in long-term remitted anorexia nervosa

Schloesser L*, Lotter LD*, Offermann J, Borucki K, Biemann R, Seitz J, Konrad K, & Herpertz-Dahlmann B (2023). European Eating Disorders Review.

Reflecting on the use of persuasive communication devices in academic writing

Corneille O, Havemann J, Henderson EL, Ijzerman H, Hussey I, Orban de Xivry J, Jussim L, Holmes NP, Pilacinski A, Beffara B, Carroll H, Outa NO, Lush P, Lotter, LD (2023). eLife.

Revealing the neurobiology underlying interpersonal neural synchronization with multimodal data fusion

Lotter LD, Kohl SH, Gerloff C, Bell L, Niephaus A, Kruppa JA, Dukart J, Schulte-Rüther M, Reindl V, & Konrad K (2023). Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Recovery-Associated Resting-State Activity and Connectivity Alterations in Anorexia Nervosa

Lotter LD, von Polier G, Offermann J, Buettgen K, Stanetzky L, Eickhoff SB, Konrad K, Seitz J*, & Dukart J* (2021). Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.

Autism spectrum symptoms in children with congenital blindness

Pankert K, Pankert A, Lotter LD, Herpertz-Dahlmann B, & Konrad K (2020). Zeitschrift für Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrie und Psychotherapie. [German]

* equal contributions