This conference has brought together people from a variety of different disciplines including theoretical mathematics, applied mathematics, computer science, statistics, biomedical engineering and neurology. With this broad spectrum of backgrounds in mind, I will give a brief introduction and overview to some of the topics and terminology that will be discussed in more detail throughout this conference. These topics include an introduction to the human brain and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data; an overview of the pre-processing steps that are required to transform MRI data into a form suitable for applying discrete geometric and conformal methods.