Browsing by Author "Bao, Jingxuan"
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Item An interpretable Alzheimer's disease oligogenic risk score informed by neuroimaging biomarkers improves risk prediction and stratification(Frontiers Media, 2023-10-26) Suh, Erica H.; Lee, Garam; Jung, Sang-Hyuk; Wen, Zixuan; Bao, Jingxuan; Nho, Kwangsik; Huang, Heng; Davatzikos, Christos; Saykin, Andrew J.; Thompson, Paul M.; Shen, Li; Kim, Dokyoon; Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineIntroduction: Stratification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients into risk subgroups using Polygenic Risk Scores (PRS) presents novel opportunities for the development of clinical trials and disease-modifying therapies. However, the heterogeneous nature of AD continues to pose significant challenges for the clinical broadscale use of PRS. PRS remains unfit in demonstrating sufficient accuracy in risk prediction, particularly for individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and in allowing feasible interpretation of specific genes or SNPs contributing to disease risk. We propose adORS, a novel oligogenic risk score for AD, to better predict risk of disease by using an optimized list of relevant genetic risk factors. Methods: Using whole genome sequencing data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cohort (n = 1,545), we selected 20 genes that exhibited the strongest correlations with FDG-PET and AV45-PET, recognized neuroimaging biomarkers that detect functional brain changes in AD. This subset of genes was incorporated into adORS to assess, in comparison to PRS, the prediction accuracy of CN vs. AD classification and MCI conversion prediction, risk stratification of the ADNI cohort, and interpretability of the genetic information included in the scores. Results: adORS improved AUC scores over PRS in both CN vs. AD classification and MCI conversion prediction. The oligogenic model also refined risk-based stratification, even without the assistance of APOE, thus reflecting the true prevalence rate of the ADNI cohort compared to PRS. Interpretation analysis shows that genes included in adORS, such as ATF6, EFCAB11, ING5, SIK3, and CD46, have been observed in similar neurodegenerative disorders and/or are supported by AD-related literature. Discussion: Compared to conventional PRS, adORS may prove to be a more appropriate choice of differentiating patients into high or low genetic risk of AD in clinical studies or settings. Additionally, the ability to interpret specific genetic information allows the focus to be shifted from general relative risk based on a given population to the information that adORS can provide for a single individual, thus permitting the possibility of personalized treatments for AD.Item Brain-wide genome-wide colocalization study for integrating genetics, transcriptomics and brain morphometry in Alzheimer’s disease(Elsevier, 2023) Bao, Jingxuan; Wen, Junhao; Wen, Zixuan; Yang, Shu; Cui, Yuhan; Yang, Zhijian; Erus, Guray; Saykin, Andrew J.; Long, Qi; Davatzikos, Christos; Shen, Li; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineAlzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases. However, the AD mechanism has not yet been fully elucidated to date, hindering the development of effective therapies. In our work, we perform a brain imaging genomics study to link genetics, single-cell gene expression data, tissue-specific gene expression data, brain imaging-derived volumetric endophenotypes, and disease diagnosis to discover potential underlying neurobiological pathways for AD. To do so, we perform brain-wide genome-wide colocalization analyses to integrate multidimensional imaging genomic biobank data. Specifically, we use (1) the individual-level imputed genotyping data and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from the UK Biobank, (2) the summary statistics of the genome-wide association study (GWAS) from multiple European ancestry cohorts, and (3) the tissue-specific cis-expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTL) summary statistics from the GTEx project. We apply a Bayes factor colocalization framework and mediation analysis to these multi-modal imaging genomic data. As a result, we derive the brain regional level GWAS summary statistics for 145 brain regions with 482,831 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) followed by posthoc functional annotations. Our analysis yields the discovery of a potential AD causal pathway from a systems biology perspective: the SNP chr10:124165615:G>A (rs6585827) mutation upregulates the expression of BTBD16 gene in oligodendrocytes, a specialized glial cells, in the brain cortex, leading to a reduced risk of volumetric loss in the entorhinal cortex, resulting in the protective effect on AD. We substantiate our findings with multiple evidence from existing imaging, genetic and genomic studies in AD literature. Our study connects genetics, molecular and cellular signatures, regional brain morphologic endophenotypes, and AD diagnosis, providing new insights into the mechanistic understanding of the disease. Our findings can provide valuable guidance for subsequent therapeutic target identification and drug discovery in AD.Item Characterizing Heterogeneity in Neuroimaging, Cognition, Clinical Symptoms, and Genetics Among Patients With Late-Life Depression(American Medical Association, 2022) Wen, Junhao; Fu, Cynthia H. Y.; Tosun, Duygu; Veturi, Yogasudha; Yang, Zhijian; Abdulkadir, Ahmed; Mamourian, Elizabeth; Srinivasan, Dhivya; Skampardoni, Ioanna; Singh, Ashish; Nawani, Hema; Bao, Jingxuan; Erus, Guray; Shou, Haochang; Habes, Mohamad; Doshi, Jimit; Varol, Erdem; Mackin, R. Scott; Sotiras, Aristeidis; Fan, Yong; Saykin, Andrew J.; Sheline, Yvette I.; Shen, Li; Ritchie, Marylyn D.; Wolk, David A.; Albert, Marilyn; Resnick, Susan M.; Davatzikos, Christos; iSTAGING consortium; ADNI; BIOCARD; BLSA; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineImportance: Late-life depression (LLD) is characterized by considerable heterogeneity in clinical manifestation. Unraveling such heterogeneity might aid in elucidating etiological mechanisms and support precision and individualized medicine. Objective: To cross-sectionally and longitudinally delineate disease-related heterogeneity in LLD associated with neuroanatomy, cognitive functioning, clinical symptoms, and genetic profiles. Design, setting, and participants: The Imaging-Based Coordinate System for Aging and Neurodegenerative Diseases (iSTAGING) study is an international multicenter consortium investigating brain aging in pooled and harmonized data from 13 studies with more than 35 000 participants, including a subset of individuals with major depressive disorder. Multimodal data from a multicenter sample (N = 996), including neuroimaging, neurocognitive assessments, and genetics, were analyzed in this study. A semisupervised clustering method (heterogeneity through discriminative analysis) was applied to regional gray matter (GM) brain volumes to derive dimensional representations. Data were collected from July 2017 to July 2020 and analyzed from July 2020 to December 2021. Main outcomes and measures: Two dimensions were identified to delineate LLD-associated heterogeneity in voxelwise GM maps, white matter (WM) fractional anisotropy, neurocognitive functioning, clinical phenotype, and genetics. Results: A total of 501 participants with LLD (mean [SD] age, 67.39 [5.56] years; 332 women) and 495 healthy control individuals (mean [SD] age, 66.53 [5.16] years; 333 women) were included. Patients in dimension 1 demonstrated relatively preserved brain anatomy without WM disruptions relative to healthy control individuals. In contrast, patients in dimension 2 showed widespread brain atrophy and WM integrity disruptions, along with cognitive impairment and higher depression severity. Moreover, 1 de novo independent genetic variant (rs13120336; chromosome: 4, 186387714; minor allele, G) was significantly associated with dimension 1 (odds ratio, 2.35; SE, 0.15; P = 3.14 ×108) but not with dimension 2. The 2 dimensions demonstrated significant single-nucleotide variant-based heritability of 18% to 27% within the general population (N = 12 518 in UK Biobank). In a subset of individuals having longitudinal measurements, those in dimension 2 experienced a more rapid longitudinal change in GM and brain age (Cohen f2 = 0.03; P = .02) and were more likely to progress to Alzheimer disease (Cohen f2 = 0.03; P = .03) compared with those in dimension 1 (N = 1431 participants and 7224 scans from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative [ADNI], Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging [BLSA], and Biomarkers for Older Controls at Risk for Dementia [BIOCARD] data sets). Conclusions and relevance: This study characterized heterogeneity in LLD into 2 dimensions with distinct neuroanatomical, cognitive, clinical, and genetic profiles. This dimensional approach provides a potential mechanism for investigating the heterogeneity of LLD and the relevance of the latent dimensions to possible disease mechanisms, clinical outcomes, and responses to interventions.Item Genomic loci influence patterns of structural covariance in the human brain(National Academy of Science, 2023) Wen, Junhao; Nasrallah, Ilya M.; Abdulkadir, Ahmed; Satterthwaite, Theodore D.; Yang, Zhijian; Erus, Guray; Robert-Fitzgerald, Timothy; Singh, Ashish; Sotiras, Aristeidis; Boquet-Pujadas, Aleix; Mamourian, Elizabeth; Doshi, Jimit; Cui, Yuhan; Srinivasan, Dhivya; Skampardoni, Ioanna; Chen, Jiong; Hwang, Gyujoon; Bergman, Mark; Bao, Jingxuan; Veturi, Yogasudha; Zhou, Zhen; Yang, Shu; Dazzan, Paola; Kahn, Rene S.; Schnack, Hugo G.; Zanetti, Marcus V.; Meisenzahl, Eva; Busatto, Geraldo F.; Crespo-Facorro, Benedicto; Pantelis, Christos; Wood, Stephen J.; Zhuo, Chuanjun; Shinohara, Russell T.; Gur, Ruben C.; Gur, Raquel E.; Koutsouleris, Nikolaos; Wolf, Daniel H.; Saykin, Andrew J.; Ritchie, Marylyn D.; Shen, Li; Thompson, Paul M.; Colliot, Olivier; Wittfeld, Katharina; Grabe, Hans J.; Tosun, Duygu; Bilgel, Murat; An, Yang; Marcus, Daniel S.; LaMontagne, Pamela; Heckbert, Susan R.; Austin, Thomas R.; Launer, Lenore J.; Espeland, Mark; Masters, Colin L.; Maruff, Paul; Fripp, Jurgen; Johnson, Sterling C.; Morris, John C.; Albert, Marilyn S.; Bryan, R. Nick; Resnick, Susan M.; Fan, Yong; Habes, Mohamad; Wolk, David; Shou, Haochang; Davatzikos, Christos; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineNormal and pathologic neurobiological processes influence brain morphology in coordinated ways that give rise to patterns of structural covariance (PSC) across brain regions and individuals during brain aging and diseases. The genetic underpinnings of these patterns remain largely unknown. We apply a stochastic multivariate factorization method to a diverse population of 50,699 individuals (12 studies and 130 sites) and derive data-driven, multi-scale PSCs of regional brain size. PSCs were significantly correlated with 915 genomic loci in the discovery set, 617 of which are newly identified, and 72% were independently replicated. Key pathways influencing PSCs involve reelin signaling, apoptosis, neurogenesis, and appendage development, while pathways of breast cancer indicate potential interplays between brain metastasis and PSCs associated with neurodegeneration and dementia. Using support vector machines, multi-scale PSCs effectively derive imaging signatures of several brain diseases. Our results elucidate genetic and biological underpinnings that influence structural covariance patterns in the human brain.Item Identifying highly heritable brain amyloid phenotypes through mining Alzheimer's imaging and sequencing biobank data(World Scientific, 2022) Bao, Jingxuan; Wen, Zixuan; Kim, Mansu; Zhao, Xiwen; Lee, Brian N.; Jung, Sang-Hyuk; Davatzikos, Christos; Saykin, Andrew J.; Thompson, Paul M.; Kim, Dokyoon; Zhao, Yize; Shen, Li; Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineBrain imaging genetics, an emerging and rapidly growing research field, studies the relationship between genetic variations and brain imaging quantitative traits (QTs) to gain new insights into the phenotypic characteristics and genetic mechanisms of the brain. Heritability is an important measurement to quantify the proportion of the observed variance in an imaging QT that is explained by genetic factors, and can often be used to prioritize brain QTs for subsequent imaging genetic association studies. Most existing studies define regional imaging QTs using predefined brain parcellation schemes such as the automated anatomical labeling (AAL) atlas. However, the power to dissect genetic underpinnings under QTs defined in such an unsupervised fashion could be negatively affected by heterogeneity within the regions in the partition. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel method to define highly heritable brain regions. Based on voxelwise heritability estimates, we extract brain regions containing spatially connected voxels with high heritability. We perform an empirical study on the amyloid imaging and whole genome sequencing data from a landmark Alzheimer’s disease biobank; and demonstrate the regions defined by our method have much higher estimated heritabilities than the regions defined by the AAL atlas. Our proposed method refines the imaging endophenotype constructions in light of their genetic dissection, and yields more powerful imaging QTs for subsequent detection of genetic risk factors along with better interpretability.Item Identifying imaging genetic associations via regional morphometricity estimation(World Scientific, 2022) Bao, Jingxuan; Wen, Zixuan; Kim, Mansu; Saykin, Andrew J.; Thompson, Paul M.; Zhao, Yize; Shen, Li; Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineBrain imaging genetics is an emerging research field aiming to reveal the genetic basis of brain traits captured by imaging data. Inspired by heritability analysis, the concept of morphometricity was recently introduced to assess trait association with whole brain morphology. In this study, we extend the concept of morphometricity from its original definition at the whole brain level to a more focal level based on a region of interest (ROI). We propose a novel framework to identify the SNP-ROI association via regional morphometricity estimation of each studied single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). We perform an empirical study on the structural MRI and genotyping data from a landmark Alzheimer’s disease (AD) biobank; and yield promising results. Our findings indicate that the AD-related SNPs have higher overall regional morphometricity estimates than the SNPs not yet related to AD. This observation suggests that the variance of AD SNPs can be explained more by regional morphometric features than non-AD SNPs, supporting the value of imaging traits as targets in studying AD genetics. Also, we identified 11 ROIs, where the AD/non-AD SNPs and significant/insignificant morphometricity estimation of the corresponding SNPs in these ROIs show strong dependency. Supplementary motor area (SMA) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DPC) are enriched by these ROIs. Our results also demonstrate that using all the detailed voxel-level measures within the ROI to incorporate morphometric information outperforms using only a single average ROI measure, and thus provides improved power to detect imaging genetic associations.Item Integrative analysis of multi-omics and imaging data with incorporation of biological information via structural Bayesian factor analysis(Oxford University Press, 2023) Bao, Jingxuan; Chang, Changgee; Zhang, Qiyiwen; Saykin, Andrew J.; Shen, Li; Long, Qi; Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineMotivation: With the rapid development of modern technologies, massive data are available for the systematic study of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Though many existing AD studies mainly focus on single-modality omics data, multi-omics datasets can provide a more comprehensive understanding of AD. To bridge this gap, we proposed a novel structural Bayesian factor analysis framework (SBFA) to extract the information shared by multi-omics data through the aggregation of genotyping data, gene expression data, neuroimaging phenotypes and prior biological network knowledge. Our approach can extract common information shared by different modalities and encourage biologically related features to be selected, guiding future AD research in a biologically meaningful way. Method: Our SBFA model decomposes the mean parameters of the data into a sparse factor loading matrix and a factor matrix, where the factor matrix represents the common information extracted from multi-omics and imaging data. Our framework is designed to incorporate prior biological network information. Our simulation study demonstrated that our proposed SBFA framework could achieve the best performance compared with the other state-of-the-art factor-analysis-based integrative analysis methods. Results: We apply our proposed SBFA model together with several state-of-the-art factor analysis models to extract the latent common information from genotyping, gene expression and brain imaging data simultaneously from the ADNI biobank database. The latent information is then used to predict the functional activities questionnaire score, an important measurement for diagnosis of AD quantifying subjects' abilities in daily life. Our SBFA model shows the best prediction performance compared with the other factor analysis models. Availability: Code are publicly available at https://github.com/JingxuanBao/SBFA.Item Mining High-Level Imaging Genetic Associations via Clustering AD Candidate Variants with Similar Brain Association Patterns(MDPI, 2022-08-24) Wu, Ruiming; Bao, Jingxuan; Kim, Mansu; Saykin, Andrew J.; Moore, Jason H.; Shen, Li; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineBrain imaging genetics examines associations between imaging quantitative traits (QTs) and genetic factors such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to provide important insights into the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The individual level SNP-QT signals are high dimensional and typically have small effect sizes, making them hard to be detected and replicated. To overcome this limitation, this work proposes a new approach that identifies high-level imaging genetic associations through applying multigraph clustering to the SNP-QT association maps. Given an SNP set and a brain QT set, the association between each SNP and each QT is evaluated using a linear regression model. Based on the resulting SNP-QT association map, five SNP-SNP similarity networks (or graphs) are created using five different scoring functions, respectively. Multigraph clustering is applied to these networks to identify SNP clusters with similar association patterns with all the brain QTs. After that, functional annotation is performed for each identified SNP cluster and its corresponding brain association pattern. We applied this pipeline to an AD imaging genetic study, which yielded promising results. For example, in an association study between 54 AD SNPs and 116 amyloid QTs, we identified two SNP clusters with one responsible for amyloid beta clearances and the other regulating amyloid beta formation. These high-level findings have the potential to provide valuable insights into relevant genetic pathways and brain circuits, which can help form new hypotheses for more detailed imaging and genetics studies in independent cohorts.Item Preference Matrix Guided Sparse Canonical Correlation Analysis for Genetic Study of Quantitative Traits in Alzheimer’s Disease(IEEE, 2022-12) Sha, Jiahang; Bao, Jingxuan; Liu, Kefei; Yang, Shu; Wen, Zixuan; Cui, Yuhan; Wen, Junhao; Davatzikos, Christos; Moore, Jason H.; Saykin, Andrew J.; Long, Qi; Shen, Li; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of MedicineInvestigating the relationship between genetic variation and phenotypic traits is a key issue in quantitative genetics. Specifically for Alzheimer’s disease, the association between genetic markers and quantitative traits remains vague while, once identified, will provide valuable guidance for the study and development of genetic-based treatment approaches. Currently, to analyze the association of two modalities, sparse canonical correlation analysis (SCCA) is commonly used to compute one sparse linear combination of the variable features for each modality, giving a pair of linear combination vectors in total that maximizes the cross-correlation between the analyzed modalities. One drawback of the plain SCCA model is that the existing findings and knowledge cannot be integrated into the model as priors to help extract interesting correlation as well as identify biologically meaningful genetic and phenotypic markers. To bridge this gap, we introduce preference matrix guided SCCA (PM-SCCA) that not only takes priors encoded as a preference matrix but also maintains computational simplicity. A simulation study and a real-data experiment are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the model. Both experiments demonstrate that the proposed PM-SCCA model can capture not only genotype-phenotype correlation but also relevant features effectively.