Medical Physics Lunchtime Seminar: Andre Altmann

Images and Genes: Imaging genetics in brain disorders

Abstract:

In this talk I will introduce the field of imaging genetics and its application to brain disorders, in particular Alzheimer’s disease. In imaging genetics measures derived from (neuro-)imaging are used as endpoints in statistical analyses of genetic data. This is in contrast to conducting such studies with dichotomous case-control labels. Replacing crisp diagnostic labels with imaging marker that are thought to better reflect the disease process are expected to lend increased statistical power to such analyses and also allow to investigate different aspects of the underlying disease process.

In this talk, we will briefly revisit conceptual challenges that are posed by jointly analyzing genomic and neuroimaging data. In particular, we will touch three topics: 

1) leveraging large-scale genetic knowledge in imaging genetics 

2) incorporating multimodal imaging data and 

3) statistical methods for jointly analyzing high-dimensional genetic and imaging data.

Bio:

Andre Altmann studied Computer Science at the RWTH Aachen, Germany, and graduated in 2005 with a work in the field of spoken language recognition at the Chair for Computer Science 6. After that he pursued a PhD in the field of Bioinformatics in the Computational Biology Group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany. 

Following his PhD he was a Postdoctoral researcher in the Statistical Genetics Group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, till mid 2012. Following this appointment Dr. Altmann worked at the FIND lab of the Stanford University, USA, first as a Postdoctoral Scholar and later as an Instructor. In August 2015 Dr Altmann joined UCL‘s Translational Imaging Group (TIG) as a MRC Senior Fellow with support from the eMedLab project.