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Approved Research

AI based integration of multi omic data for precision medicine in movement disorders

Principal Investigator: Dr Thomas Welton
Approved Research ID: 82354
Approval date: November 11th 2022

Lay summary

Essential tremor and Parkinson's disease are common movement disorders. They are difficult to diagnose and monitor because there is no single factor that tells us their status, and there are many intermixing factors which cause them. This project aims to create new ways of investigating the causes of movement disorders using artificial intelligence (AI) to combine data across different levels of biology, from the genetic, to markers present in the blood, to brain structure and behaviour. The AI will be able to identify combinations that are relevant for clinical status. This could provide a clearer understanding of the causes of these diseases, which will allow doctors to diagnose earlier and be more informed in their treatment decisions.

Our group has access to large Parkinson's and essential tremor cohorts with high quality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other biomarker data. We aim to identify new signatures of these disorders, to understand how combined information from multiple biological scales might help in diagnosis and subtyping, and to test for replication and validation of these findings in a large combined sample which will include the UK Biobank data.

We are requesting 36 months' access to data from subjects with movement disorders and controls who had brain MRI (MRI, demographic, clinical, cognitive, behavioural, genetic and biomarker data).