Imaging Genetics

The domain of imaging-genetics has been focus of great attention from the research community over the past years. From an analytical perspective, the goal of imaging-genetics consists in identifying meaningful relationships between high-dimensional arrays of genetic information, such as series of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and the phenotype represented in medical image signal. This problem presents important statistical and computational challenges, and in the past several approaches have been proposed to allow jointly analyzing this heterogeneous information in large medical imaging cohorts. This chapter provides a step-by-step introduction to the main methodology and relevant literature of the domain. By first illustrating the basis of genetics and of genetics analysis, we will introduce to the reader to the standard statistical tools adopted in the domain of imaging-genetics, from mass-univariate paradigms, to more complex multivariate methods and their regularized counterparts.