BRAIN Initiative: Theories, Models and Methods for Analysis of Complex Data from the Brain

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Abstract The twin study design in brain imaging offers a very effective way of determining heritability of the human brain. The difference in variability between monozygotic (MZ) and same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins can be used in determining heritability. We propose to determine the extent of heritability of both structural and functional brain networks at the voxel-level using 200 pairs of twin (400 individuals) of fMRI/DTI and MRI. To obtain high- resolution heritability map of the brain networks, the project requires taking more than 25 thousands voxels for fMRI and 1.2million voxels for MRI/DTI as network nodes, which is a serious computational challenge. The project proposes many new algorithms for constructing large-scale brain networks and subsequently mapping the heritability of the networks. This study will provide the brain imaging community with the baseline brain network heritability maps as well as a versatile open-source toolbox of algorithms for modeling and visualizing large-scale brain networks of three different imaging modalities.