The RR-BIG summer institute combines different sessions, including lectures, laboratory practice, seminars, roundtable discussions, and mentored group projects. The lectures will (1) teach fundamentals in neuroimaging research and selecting clinically meaningful mental health phenotypes; (2) tutor basic principles in genetics and statistical methods for imaging genomics analysis (e.g., heritability); and (3) guide participants to conduct an integrative neuroimaging genomics analysis from study design, to data manipulation and analysis, to result dissemination. The laboratory practice parallels the lectures and provides trainees with hands-on tutoring to access and retrieve the neuroimaging, genomics, and clinical data available in the ABCD database. The labs will provide practice in conducting exploratory and formal analysis to identify genetic variants associated with neuroimaging using appropriate statistical tools in the R platform. Seminars and roundtable discussions incorporate leading faculty sharing their research on the cutting edges of brain imaging genomics studies and experience for robust and reproducible research. The team projects enable trainees to apply their training to real brain imaging genomics research from study design to analysis result presentation, benefiting from complementary expertise of team members and professional guidance of faculty mentors.

Core Topics

• The basics of brain structure and neuroimaging modalities, and selection of clinically meaningful imaging phenotypes for mental disorder studies.
• Fundamentals of genomics data and integration with imaging datasets.
• Statistical methods for heritability and association analysis of genomics data with neuroimaging phenotypes.
• Analytical and statistical considerations specific to large open databases.
• Best practices for reproducible research, including documentation and version control (Git/GitHub).

Hands-On Activities

• Learning how to access and retrieve the neuroimaging, genomics and clinical data that are available in the ABCD database using the new ABCD platform monitored by LASSO.
• Conduct an integrative neuroimaging genomics analysis to identify genetic variants associated with ADHD.
• Implementing reproducible pipelines with literate programming tools (R Markdown, Quarto).
• Create collaborative data analysis projects in small teams.

Mentored Team Project

Participants will work in interdisciplinary teams to design and implement a reproducible neuroimaging genomics analysis, from raw data to a documented and shareable final report.

Competencies Gained

1. Understand the important scientific questions in brain imaging genomics studies
2. Know how to access and retrieve large-scale multi-modal data in the ABCD database
3. Be aware of the analytical and statistical considerations specific to large, open data
4. Use appropriate tools to perform exploratory analysis and necessary preprocessing such as data harmonization to identify and/or remove inconsistency in the large datasets
5. Design brain genomics studies with clinically meaningful imaging phenotypes of mental health
6. Know the basic principles and state-of-art methods for heritability estimation with imaging outcomes and neuroimaging-genomics association analysis
7. Perform integrative neuroimaging genomics analysis in R or relevant tools
8. Understand various evaluation metrics and select appropriate metrics for model evaluation
9. Conduct reproducible research with the best practices of coding and documentation
10. Communicate with researchers from diverse backgrounds and build interdisciplinary teams