Title: Associations of neuroanatomy with multiple neuropsychological disorders and test scores
Type: Postgraduate Non-Degree Program in Informatics
Student: Richard Gaus
Supervisor: Sebastian Pölsterl, Christian Wachinger
Status: Finished, November 10, 2020
Abstract:
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is a multisite longitudinal study focusing on brain, social, emotional, and cognitive development in children. The study recruited over 11,000 children aged 9-10 and acquired structural brain imaging and neuropsychological assessments for each of its participants. The goal of this thesis is to perform exploratory analysis to determine to which extent a child’s neuroanatomy is predictive of a wide range of neuropsychological disorders and tests. The neuroanatomy will be captured by summary measures, such as volume and thickness extracted from MRI scans. To avoid that confounding factors inflate the predictive performance, confounders need to be identified and accounted for in the analysis. The predictive performance will be evaluated via cross-validation and compared to a naive baseline that excludes neuroanatomical information.