DMS Statistics and Data Science Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Panpan Zhang (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University Medical Center)

Title: Challenges and Opportunities for Longitudinal Analysis of Neurodegenerative Disorders

 
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) are chronic neurodegenerative disorders that gradually destroy memory, thinking skills, and mobility, causing significant impacts on life quality and economic burden. Longitudinal analysis is a promising tool that helps clinicians and neuroscientists better understand changes in the characteristics of the target population over the continuum of AD (or PD) progression. However, the lengthy course of development of such diseases poses many challenges in biostatistical studies. In this presentation, I will introduce two recent projects respectively focusing on missing covariate problems and mismatching time scale problems arising from the longitudinal modeling of AD and PD. I will showcase the novelty of the proposed methods, but also discuss their limitations and potential improvements. The applications in these two projects are primarily based on the open data from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) and the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI).