Browsing by Author "Duong-Tran, Duy"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A genetically informed brain atlas for enhancing brain imaging genomics
    (Springer Nature, 2025-04-14) Bao, Jingxuan; Wen, Junhao; Chang, Changgee; Mu, Shizhuo; Chen, Jiong; Shivakumar, Manu; Cui, Yuhan; Erus, Guray; Yang, Zhijian; Yang, Shu; Wen, Zixuan; The Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative; Zhao, Yize; Kim, Dokyoon; Duong-Tran, Duy; Saykin, Andrew J.; Zhao, Bingxin; Davatzikos, Christos; Long, Qi; Shen, Li; Biostatistics and Health Data Science, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health
    Brain imaging genomics has manifested considerable potential in illuminating the genetic determinants of human brain structure and function. This has propelled us to develop the GIANT (Genetically Informed brAiN aTlas) that accounts for genetic and neuroanatomical variations simultaneously. Integrating voxel-wise heritability and spatial proximity, GIANT clusters brain voxels into genetically informed regions, while retaining fundamental anatomical knowledge. Compared to conventional (non-genetics) brain atlases, GIANT exhibits smaller intra-region variations and larger inter-region variations in terms of voxel-wise heritability. As a result, GIANT yields increased regional SNP heritability, enhanced polygenicity, and its polygenic risk score explains more brain volumetric variation than traditional neuroanatomical brain atlases. We provide extensive validation to GIANT and demonstrate its neuroanatomical validity, confirming its generalizability across populations with diverse genetic ancestries and various brain conditions. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive genetic architecture of the GIANT regions, covering their functional annotation at the molecular levels, their associations with other complex traits/diseases, and the genetic and phenotypic correlations among GIANT-defined imaging endophenotypes. In summary, GIANT constitutes a brain atlas that captures the complexity of genetic and neuroanatomical heterogeneity, thereby enhancing the discovery power and applicability of imaging genomics investigations in biomedical science.
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    Consistency of Graph Theoretical Measurements of Alzheimer’s Disease Fiber Density Connectomes Across Multiple Parcellation Scales
    (IEEE, 2022-12) Xu, Frederick; Garai, Sumita; Duong-Tran, Duy; Saykin, Andrew J.; Zha, Yize; Shen, Li; Radiology and Imaging Sciences, School of Medicine
    Graph theoretical measures have frequently been used to study disrupted connectivity in Alzheimer’s disease human brain connectomes. However, prior studies have noted that differences in graph creation methods are confounding factors that may alter the topological observations found in these measures. In this study, we conduct a novel investigation regarding the effect of parcellation scale on graph theoretical measures computed for fiber density networks derived from diffusion tensor imaging. We computed 4 network-wide graph theoretical measures of average clustering coefficient, transitivity, characteristic path length, and global efficiency, and we tested whether these measures are able to consistently identify group differences among healthy control (HC), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD groups in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cohort across 5 scales of the Lausanne parcellation. We found that the segregative measure of transtivity offered the greatest consistency across scales in distinguishing between healthy and diseased groups, while the other measures were impacted by the selection of scale to varying degrees. Global efficiency was the second most consistent measure that we tested, where the measure could distinguish between HC and MCI in all 5 scales and between HC and AD in 3 out of 5 scales. Characteristic path length was highly sensitive to the variation in scale, corroborating previous findings, and could not identify group differences in many of the scales. Average clustering coefficient was also greatly impacted by scale, as it consistently failed to identify group differences in the higher resolution parcellations. From these results, we conclude that many graph theoretical measures are sensitive to the selection of parcellation scale, and further development in methodology is needed to offer a more robust characterization of AD’s relationship with disrupted connectivity.
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    A morphospace of functional configuration to assess configural breadth based on brain functional networks
    (MIT Press, 2021-09) Duong-Tran, Duy; Abbas, Kausar; Amico, Enrico; Corominas-Murtra, Bernat; Dzemidzic, Mario; Kareken, David; Ventresca, Mario; Goñi, Joaquín; Neurology, School of Medicine
    The quantification of human brain functional (re)configurations across varying cognitive demands remains an unresolved topic. We propose that such functional configurations may be categorized into three different types: (a) network configural breadth, (b) task-to task transitional reconfiguration, and (c) within-task reconfiguration. Such functional reconfigurations are rather subtle at the whole-brain level. Hence, we propose a mesoscopic framework focused on functional networks (FNs) or communities to quantify functional (re)configurations. To do so, we introduce a 2D network morphospace that relies on two novel mesoscopic metrics, trapping efficiency (TE) and exit entropy (EE), which capture topology and integration of information within and between a reference set of FNs. We use this framework to quantify the network configural breadth across different tasks. We show that the metrics defining this morphospace can differentiate FNs, cognitive tasks, and subjects. We also show that network configural breadth significantly predicts behavioral measures, such as episodic memory, verbal episodic memory, fluid intelligence, and general intelligence. In essence, we put forth a framework to explore the cognitive space in a comprehensive manner, for each individual separately, and at different levels of granularity. This tool that can also quantify the FN reconfigurations that result from the brain switching between mental states.
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    Tangent functional connectomes uncover more unique phenotypic traits
    (Elsevier, 2023-08-12) Abbas, Kausar; Liu, Mintao; Wang, Michael; Duong-Tran, Duy; Tipnis, Uttara; Amico, Enrico; Kaplan, Alan D.; Dzemidzic, Mario; Kareken, David; Ances, Beau M.; Harezlak, Jaroslaw; Goñi, Joaquín; Neurology, School of Medicine
    Functional connectomes (FCs) containing pairwise estimations of functional couplings between pairs of brain regions are commonly represented by correlation matrices. As symmetric positive definite matrices, FCs can be transformed via tangent space projections, resulting into tangent-FCs. Tangent-FCs have led to more accurate models predicting brain conditions or aging. Motivated by the fact that tangent-FCs seem to be better biomarkers than FCs, we hypothesized that tangent-FCs have also a higher fingerprint. We explored the effects of six factors: fMRI condition, scan length, parcellation granularity, reference matrix, main-diagonal regularization, and distance metric. Our results showed that identification rates are systematically higher when using tangent-FCs across the “fingerprint gradient” (here including test-retest, monozygotic and dizygotic twins). Highest identification rates were achieved when minimally (0.01) regularizing FCs while performing tangent space projection using Riemann reference matrix and using correlation distance to compare the resulting tangent-FCs. Such configuration was validated in a second dataset (resting-state).