There are many active research projects accessing and applying shared ADNI data. Use the search above to find specific research focuses on the active ADNI investigations. This information is requested annually as a requirement for data access.
| Principal Investigator | |
| Principal Investigator's Name: | quan long |
| Institution: | University of Calgary |
| Department: | Biochemistry and Molecular Biology |
| Country: | |
| Proposed Analysis: | Elucidating the genetic basis of brain disorders can help reduce the social-economic burden and improve quality of life. In the field of statistic genetics, one of the ultimate goals is to identify causal genetic variants associated with diseases, and the other one is genotype-based phenotype prediction, which may help tailor precision medication for individuals. However, there are still gaps between statistic prediction and real traits. This is partly due to the high dimensionality of genetic variants together with relatively small samples, which leads to overfitting. Overfitting is a common problem in statistical learning, which is especially detrimental when the models only statistically fit the training data without reflecting genuine biological association.. In this project, we aim to bridge the gap by integrating multi-omics data and characterizing statistical models to form powerful predictors. We hypothesize that the genotype and the focal phenotype are linked by internal phenotypes such as various ‘omics and brain features (e.g., hippocampal volume). So instead of using millions of genetic data only, we intend to assimilate biological information from multi-scale ‘omics and brain images into machine learning algorithms such as regularization, kernel machine, Bayesian method, and etc. In this way, noisy genetic variants are eliminated, and meaningful biological information will stand out. The success of this project will further our understanding of genetic basis of brain diseases and provide a novel approach to study the pathology of brain diseases. |
| Additional Investigators |
