Deep-learning models to investigate the link between Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and cardiovascular diseases using structural brain MRI.
Lead analyst: Clara Jiang (The University of Queensland)
Evidence from observational and genetic studies has shown a strong bidirectional association between depression and cardiovascular diseases (CVD), where individuals with depression have a higher risk of developing CVDs and vice versa. Understanding the effects of commonly used CVD medications on depression is thus important to prevent unintentional adverse effects, and to explore potential drug repurposing opportunities.
The proposed study aims to use machine-learning and deep-learning algorithms to understand how brain structure can predict the risk of depression and CVD comorbidities, and leverage the depression-related neuroimaging characteristics and statistical genomic approaches to infer sex-specific causal effects of CVD medication on depression.
The findings from the study are anticipated to improve the current understanding of the mechanisms underlying the depression-CVD comorbidity, as well as to inform the potential effects of CVD medications on depression-related brain biology.
Status: ONGOING
Genome-wide association study of the choroid plexus volume in the UKBiobank
Lead analyst: Arya Yazdan-Panah (INRIA, Paris Brain Institute)
The Choroid Plexuses (CP) are a veil-like structure located in the lateral ventricles of the brain. They play a key role in keeping the brain homeostatic state. Multiple studies have suggested changes in CP volume (CPv) in various neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD, and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Previous studies have relied on manual segmentations of the CP, resulting in small sample sizes, or on noisy automated segmentation that also limits statistical power.
We have trained and applied to the UKBiobank (N>40,000) an automatic segmentation method for the CP from T2-weighted FLAIR MRI. We will perform Genome-Wide Association study, and a whole set of genetic analyses, to shed light on the genetic variants infludencing CPv and how they relate to diseases of the brain or immune disorders.
Status: ONGOING
