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: | Marcin Radecki |
| Institution: | IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca |
| Department: | Molecular Mind Laboratory |
| Country: | |
| Proposed Analysis: | We wish to use machine learning to better understand the relationship between sex and the brain, controlling for individual differences in age, cognition, and other covariates. Since ADNI constitutes an impressively large brain-imaging dataset, which additionally includes demographic and psychological information, it offers a unique opportunity for deepening our understanding of the above relationship. Machine learning requires extensive datasets and so ADNI is particularly suited for our analysis. As for specifics of the analysis, we continue to work on them, but our hypotheses revolve around the question whether, and potentially to what extent, there exist neural differences between males and females that have been matched for brain size. Recent evidence suggests that brain size accounts for most, if not all, sex differences in the brain (Eliot et al., 2021; van Eijk et al., 2021), and we wish to quantify this putative mediation with the help of multivariate algorithms. We have already gained access to similarly large brain-imaging datasets (e.g. HCP, GSP, OASIS), which we would use alongside ADNI to ensure robustness and replicability of our results. This investigation is important because there are pervasive sex differences in various clinical characteristics - such as the prevalence of psychiatric/neurological conditions, including Alzheimer's - as well as some psychological traits that brain differences might help to explain. We would be sincerely grateful for being granted access to ADNI and we kindly thank you for your consideration. References: Eliot et al. (2021). Dump the "dimorphism": Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 125, 667-697. van Eijk et al. (2021). Are sex differences in human brain structure associated with sex differences in behavior? Psychological Science, 32(8), 1183–1197. |
| Additional Investigators |
