Zhu awarded $1.3 million from National Institute of Mental Health
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Hongth Zhu, PhD, Associate Professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health’s Department of
Dr. Hongtu Zhu
Biostatistics, has been awarded an R01 grant worth over $1.3 million from the National Institute of Mental Health to develop statistical methods for detecting morphological differences of cortical and subcortical structures across time between schizophrenia and autism patients and healthy subjects. Neuroimaging data from various case-control and longitudinal studies are essential to understanding the development of neuropsychiatric substance use disorders, the normal brain and the interactive effects of environmental and genetic factors on brain structure and function. Using appropriate analytical and statistical tools to jointly model the neuroimaging measures and the behavioral and clinical data is critical to interpreting the findings from these neuroimaging studies. Some large imaging data including the ADNI (Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative) dataset, the longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of schizophrenia and autism and the NIH MRI study of normal brain development, have been collected or are under collection. Yet there currently is a lack of imaging statistical tools for analyzing such high-dimensional, correlated, and complex neuroimaging data. The primary goal of this project is to develop, evaluate and implement new statistical tools to jointly model neuroimaging measures, behavioral data and clinical data from cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Specifically, the following five aims will be examined: (1) multiscale adaptive regression models for imaging data; (2) regression models for manifold-valued imaging data fromcross-sectional studies; (3) regression models for manifold-valued imaging data from longitudinal studies; (4) spatial and adaptive clustering methods for manifold-valued imaging data; and (5) software development for all of the statistical tools developed in this project, which, once validated, will be available online to the research community. Co-investigators include Joseph G. Ibrahim, PhD, Alumni Distinguished Professor in Biostatistics from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, as well as Drs. John Gilmore, Joseph Piven, Dinggang Shen and Martin Styner from the UNC School of Medicine. |
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