Developing network methodologies for disease classification

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Theme (1)The physiological network is an emerging concept in health data science. Its aim is to integrate a wide range of health-related data across the body to establish the quantification of a person's functional interdependencies, to provide important insights and nuanced classification strategies of different bodily states [1]. In this theme, I will pursue the integration of a physiological network approach with deep learning classification for large health datasets, focusing - at least in the first instance - on the UK Biobank. With this, I aim to develop critical novel methodologies for the advancement of understanding and classification of health and disease.Theme (2)It is of critical societal importance to develop methods for the detection of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and other dementias in their early stages in the general population. AD is commonly known as a disconnection syndrome, whereby mass neuronal death leads to the disintegration of the brain's functional architecture [2]. I have developed novel complex network methodologies which have been developed and applied in pilot electroencephalography (EEG) data, finding abnormal topological and temporal functional patterns in patients with AD. I aim to build on this promising work, developing, refining and applying these methodologies to larger datasets of structural and functional imaging data (e.g., UK Biobank), building on my existing collaborations in the Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Research Centre. The information gathered will be used to analyse and classify AD in the general population.References: [1] Bashan, A., Bartsch, R.P., Kantelhardt, J.W., Havlin, S., Ivanov, P.C., Network Physiology reveals relations between network topology and physiological function. Nature Comms., 3: 702 (2011).[2] Delbeuck, X., Van der Linden, M., Collette, F., Alzheimer's disease as a disconnection syndrome?, Neuropsychology Review, 13(2): 79-92 (2003).[3] Bronstein, M.M., Bruna, J., LeCun, Y., Szlam, A., Vandergheynst, P., Geometric Deep Learning: going beyond euclidean data, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 34(4): 18-42 (2017).[4] Smith, K., Escudero, J., The complex hierarchical topology of EEG functional connectivity, J. Neurosci. Methods, 276: 1-12 (2017).[5] Smith, K., Ricaud, B., Shahid, N., Rhodes, S., Starr, J., Ibanez, A., Parra, M.A., Escudero, J., Vandergheynst, P., Locating temporal functional dynamics of visual short-term memory binding using graph modular Dirichlet energy, Scientific Reports, 7: 42013 (2017).