Genome-wide association studies of brain imaging data via weighted distance correlation.

ABSTRACT:

Motivation

Imaging genetics is mainly used to reveal the pathogenesis of neuropsychiatric risk genes and understand the relationship between human brain structure, functional and individual differences. Increasingly, the brain-wide imaging phenotypes in voxels are available to test the association with genetic markers. A challenge with analyzing such data is their high dimensionality and complex relationships.

Results

To tackle this challenge, we introduce a weighed distance correlation (wdCor) that can assess the association between genetic markers and voxel-based imaging data. Importantly, the wdCor test takes the voxel-based data as a whole multivariate phenotype, which preserves the spatial continuity and might enhance the power. Besides, an adaptive permutation procedur

SUBMITTER: Wen C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7750969 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature