Steve Qin, PhD, Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University will be giving a presentation on “Classification-Based GWAS With Application to Neuroimaging.” This presentation is entirely virtual, and will occur on April 8, 2025, 12:00pm - 1:00pm via Zoom. Registration is required, and upon registration, attendees will received a confirmation email with information about joining the meeting.

ABSTRACT: Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have been widely applied to discover genetic variants associated with a diverse array of traits. So far, almost all GWASs conducted in neuroimaging genetics are performed on univariate quantitative features summarized from brain images. In this study, we proposed and implemented a novel machine learning strategy for systematically identifying genetic variants that lead to detectable nuances on the full-frame Magnetic Resonance (MR) images. We applied the proposed method to a catalog of MR image and genotype data collected by the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) consortium.

Presenter: Dr. Qin is a Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory University. He received his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from University of Michigan in 2000. Following postdoctoral training at Harvard University, he joined the Department of Biostatistics at University of Michigan in 2003, before relocating to Emory University in 2010. Dr. Qin has more than 20 years of research experience in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics which covers Bioinformatics and Statistical Genetics. Recently, his research expanded to include Machine Learning, AI, Big Data Analytics, and their applications to translational and precision medicine.