MRI case studies

Since January 2019, the BRC Imaging Theme has been using the brain imaging and non-imaging data from the UK Biobank. This was created in 2016 to scan 100,000 subjects from the existing cohort.

UK Biobank is a prospective epidemiological resource gathering extensive questionnaires, physical and cognitive measures, imaging, and biological samples including genotyping. It comprises a cohort of 500,000 participants (aged 40 - 69 years at the baseline recruitment).

All data from UK Biobank is available to researchers world-wide on application, with no preferential access for the scientists leading the study.

We are applying novel analysis and processing approaches in order to:

• extract summary features from different neuroimaging modalities, complementary to what is currently provided by the UK Biobank data releases and the existing image processing pipelines, and feed those back to the research community
• fully exploit the complementary nature of different imaging modalities to better understand the interactions and cross-information between anatomical, structural, functional, lifestyle measures and future health outcomes using multi-modal data fusion approaches, and to
• further develop new image analysis approaches for population-level data.

We are using these developments to explore the interface between physical health and mental health signatures, as depicted by imaging. For instance, how chronic pain or chronic distress from tinnitus are linked to mental health.