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Approved research

Validation and transfer-learning for biomarkers obtained in several clinical cohorts of neuro developmental and neuro degenerative diseases

Principal Investigator: Mr Vincent Frouin
Approved Research ID: 64984
Approval date: September 29th 2020

Lay summary

The project aims at an in-depth evaluation of biomarkers found in clinical cohorts of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases. Several French and European clinical cohorts studied in NeuroSpin, have identified imaging-genetic biomarkers of interest for psychiatric syndromes (schizophrenia or bipolar disorder), neuro-developmental disorders (autism spectrum) or neuro-degenerative disorders (Alzheimer, Lewy body, Parkinson, SLA and Huntington diseases) and natural history development (mental health in adolescents, ageing). These biomarkers include cortical sulci and the particular shapes they can take, U-shaped white matter fibers and the diffusion signal in their vicinity, and finally genetic-based biomarkers like the polygenic risk scores. First and building on UK BioBank the largest multi-modal cohort available to date, we intend to evaluate comprehensively these clinically determined biomarkers. The evaluation includes the establishment of their variability, the reproduction of their predictive performance, the search for the co-morbidities targeted by a same given biomarker, and the ever more detailed assessment of the interactions between environmental and genetic factors involved in their variability Second we intend to use transfer learning approaches to train deep networks to learn some major sources of variability (like age, sex for example) and then to fine-tune these pre-trained classifiers in our clinical cohorts. Improved performance rates and biomarkers with augmented interpretability are expected. We expect this exchange of information between the BioBank general population and clinical cohorts will provide us with new insights in psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative disease for which we develop hypothetical biomarkers involving (i) the immune system (ii) psychomotor activity, social symptoms (iii) the vascular system ageing. The clinical cohorts involved are - the French cohort MEMENTO (Alzheimer's disease) French cohort PSY-COHorte-schizophrénie (schizophrenia), French cohort PSY-COHorte-bipolaire, European cohort R-LiNK (bipolar disorder) and InforAutism, European cohort EU-AIMS (autism spectrum disorder).