Brain imaging genetics studies the genetic basis of brain structures and functionalities via integrating genotypic data such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and imaging quantitative traits (QTs). In this area, both multi-task learning (MTL) and sparse canonical correlation analysis (SCCA) methods are widely used since they are superior to those independent and pairwise univariate analysis. MTL methods generally incorporate a few of QTs and could not select features from multiple QTs; while SCCA methods typically employ one modality of QTs to study its association with SNPs. Both MTL and SCCA are computational expensive as the number of SNPs increases. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task SCCA (MTSCCA) method to identify bi-multivariate associations between SNPs and multi-modal imaging QTs. MTSCCA could make use of the complementary information carried by different imaging modalities. MTSCCA enforces sparsity at the group level via the G2,1-norm, and jointly selects features across multiple tasks for SNPs and QTs via the L2,1-norm. A fast optimization algorithm is proposed using the grouping information of SNPs. Compared with conventional SCCA methods, MTSCCA obtains better correlation coefficients and canonical weights patterns. In addition, MTSCCA runs very fast and easy-to-implement, indicating its potential power in genome-wide brain-wide imaging genetics.
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A Dirty Multi-task Learning Method for Multi-modal Brain Imaging Genetics
Brain imaging genetics is an important research topic in brain science, which combines genetic variations and brain structures or functions to uncover the genetic basis of brain disorders. Imaging data collected by different technologies, measuring the same brain distinctly, might carry complementary but different information. Unfortunately, we do not know the extent to which phenotypic variance is shared among multiple imaging modalities, which might trace back to the complex genetic mechanism. In this study, we propose a novel dirty multi-task SCCA to analyze imaging genetics problems with multiple modalities of brain imaging quantitative traits (QTs) involved. The proposed method can not only identify the shared SNPs and QTs across multiple modalities, but also identify the modality-specific SNPs and QTs, showing a flexible capability of discovering the complex multi-SNP-multi-QT associations. Compared with the multi-view SCCA and multi-task SCCA, our method shows better canonical correlation coefficients and canonical weights on both synthetic and real neuroimaging genetic data. This demonstrates that the proposed dirty multi-task SCCA could be a meaningful and powerful alternative method in multi-modal brain imaging genetics.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1837964
- PAR ID:
- 10127251
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention
- Volume:
- 11767
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 447-455
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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