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Brain-wide association studies: Current challenges and future directions by Dr Scott Marek & Dr Brenden Tervo-Clemmens
9 June 2022 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm BST
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About the speakers
Dr Tervo-Clemmens is a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on understanding the emergence of psychopathology and substance use during adolescence and uses techniques from cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychopathology research, and data science. He is also engaged in methodological research aiming to evaluate and improve the reproducibility and ultimately, clinical utility, of large-scale fMRI research in neurodevelopmental studies. His work is supported by a Massachusetts General Hospital and National Institute on Drug Abuse Career Development Award and an early career award from the American Psychological Foundation.
Dr Marek is an Instructor in the Psychiatry Department at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. His research focuses on pediatric neuroimaging, precision functional imaging of individual brains, and best practices for reproducible research. Dr Marek leverages very large sample size datasets to understand population-level links between the brain and non-brain factors, as well as small sample size datasets with deep phenotyping to understand what makes a brain unique. His work is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.
About the talk
Mental health research and care have yet to realize substantive advances from Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), despite wide-spread and increasing use MRI and functional MRI in translational neuroscience. A primary challenge to such translational insights has been replicating associations between inter-individual differences in brain structure or function and complex cognitive or mental health phenotypes (brain-wide association studies (BWAS)). We will discuss our recent work demonstrating that a historical reliance on small sample sizes in neuroimaging can parsimoniously explain such BWAS replication failures across common, cross-sectional brain-phenotype linkage methods. Within the context of these results, additional discussion will focus on considerations and priorities for future BWAS and non-BWAS approaches to translational brain-behavior linkages.