Seminars/Colloquia/Invited Talks

Seminars

Elvan Ceyhan and Malini Hosakere

Analysis of Ventral Medial Prefrontal Cortex Metrics for Depression in Twins

PLACE:	Clark 314
EVENT:	CIS Seminar Series
DATE:	March 1, 2005
TIME:	1:00 - 2:00

Abstract

Previous studies indicate that early onset Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is highly heritable and associated with structural changes in specific prefrontal limbic structures in the brain. A decrease in left subgenual prefrontal cortex (SGPFC) volume has been reported in young women with early onset MDD.
While neuromorphometric differences in MDD are believed to be influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the specific influence of each factor is not yet fully known. Twin and family studies provide an ideal ground to evaluate these hypotheses. Structural imaging studies in affective disorders have initially focused on volumetric differences. Among other neuromorphometric parameters, newer statistical methods to characterize cortical metrics have yielded promising results in schizophrenia and dementia. We provide a detailed analysis of volumetric comparisons and cortical thickness measures.In particular, we present a new method for examining cortical metric differences based on cortical metric censoring by increment size of .01 mm from 0.00 mm to 5.50 mm. For each censoring distance (cd), we examine p-values for tests used in comparing left versus right cortical metrics and tests of group differences. This analysis provides a range of cortical metrics for which significant differences begin to occur.
References & Acknowledgements: NIH RO1 MH62626, P41-RR15241, MH57180

Brief biography

Elvan Ceyhan obtained his B.S. in Mathematics at Koç University in Turkey. He received his MS in Statistics in 2000 from Oklahoma State University and obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Johns Hopkins University in 2004. Currently he is a post doctoral fellow at Center for Imaging Science at JHU. His research interests are probabilistic inference, spatial statistics, statistical pattern recognition, computational biology, classification, random digraphs.

Malini Hosakere graduated with a Bachelors in Physics during which she was the recipient of the Notre Dame Academic Achievement Award, Westinghouse Scholarship and the Mahatma Gandhi Scholarship. She is currently on the staff at the Center for Imaging Science at Johns Hopkins University. Under the supervision of Dr. Michael I. Miller her research focus is on applying quantitative methods to characterize various neuropsychiatric illnesses such as Alzheimer's Disease, Schizophrenia and Major Depression.