Findings we would like to confirm include the association between gyrification and general cognitive ability (Gregory et al., 2016), allometric analysis of the relationship between sex chromosomes and cerebellar organization and subcortical anatomy (Reardon et al., 2016; Mankiw et al. 2017), and association between genome-wide copy number variations and brain morphometry and connectivity (Elia et al., 2011).
The research will aid in establishing relationship between brain imaging and phenotypic data. We will apply existing image processing software, including the AFNI software package developed at the NIH, for analysing the imaging data being acquired by Biobank. AFNI provides tools to perform image alignment, skull stripping, and statistical processing that is similar to those previously used on the Biobank UK imaging data. This independent processing stream will provide a valuable opportunity to compare and validate the different processing tools against one another. We will repeat genetic analyses conducted in our existing publications to confirm previous findings and look for novel findings with the assistance of the larger datasets.
We will use all of the available participants with brain imaging data which will build to 100,000 participants.