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ethan whitman

@ethanwhitman777.bsky.social

200 followers 200 following 23 posts

phd student at duke with moffitt/caspi + laboratory of neurogenetics using predictive modeling to understand brain aging

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ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

Now published in @nataging.nature.com‬ ! We propose DunedinPACNI, a new measure of the rate of aging that can be derived from a single structural brain scan www.nature.com/articles/s43...

DunedinPACNI estimates the longitudinal Pace of Aging from a single brain image to track health and disease - Nature Aging

Differences in the Pace of Aging are important for many health outcomes but difficult to measure. Here the authors describe the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging measure, an approach ...

www.nature.com

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ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · 8d

yes definitely!!

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · 9d

Congrats, Armin!!!

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Reposted by ethan whitman

Jingnan Du @jingnandu.bsky.social · 16d

Our new paper is out now in Neuron! 🎉 With @vaibhavtripathi.bsky.social @maxwellelliott.bsky.social Joanna Ladopoulou, Wendy Sun, Mark Eldaief, and Randy Buckner

Paper link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Reposted by ethan whitman

Ted Satterthwaite @ted-satterthwaite.bsky.social · 18d

Delighted to see the paper describing the Reproducible Brain Charts open data resource now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social. Paper + link to data below; huge congrats to @goliashf.bsky.social @milhammichael.bsky.social and the whole RBC team. Lots of people (>2,500 downloads) are already using RBC!

Cumulative RBC downloads over time. Lots of people are using RBC, with >2,500 downloads by time of RBC paper publication. Woo!!

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Reposted by ethan whitman

Thomas Yeo @bttyeo.bsky.social · Jul 17

1/11 Excited to share our @Naturestudy led by @leonooi.bsky.social @csabaorban.bsky.social @shaoshiz.bsky.social

AI performance is known to scale with logarithm of sample size (Kaplan 2020), but in many domains, sample size can be # participants or # measurements...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

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ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 16

thanks ted!!!

Reposted by ethan whitman

Isabella Larsen @bellalarsen.bsky.social · Jul 3

Network analysis offers new insights into psychiatric symptoms. How can we use these tools to compare symptom patterns across groups?
⬇️🧵Thread below 🧵⬇️
doi.org/10.1017/s003...

Novel tools for comparing the architecture of psychopathology between neurogenetic disorders: An application to X- versus Y-chromosome aneuploidy effects in males | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge ...

Novel tools for comparing the architecture of psychopathology between neurogenetic disorders: An application to X- versus Y-chromosome aneuploidy effects in males - Volume 55

doi.org

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Reposted by ethan whitman

Max Elliott @maxwellelliott.bsky.social · Jul 7

Do you want to estimate brain aging from a single MRI scan?

Check out our latest work in Nature Aging

"DunedinPACNI estimates the longitudinal Pace of Aging from a single brain image to track health and disease"

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Reposted by ethan whitman

Armin Raznahan @bogglerapture.bsky.social · Jul 7

Sex chromosome aneuploidies (varying X/Y-chrom dosage) can increase risk for psychopathology, but do these risks vary with age ? This matters for both clinical and mechanistic understanding.

A fab recent trainee - Melissa Roybal - asked these questions in a new paper. This is what she found ... ⬇️

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Reposted by ethan whitman

Nature @nature.com · Jul 1

Telltale features visible in standard brain images can reveal how quickly a person is ageing

https://go.nature.com/4kiNEPF

How fast is your brain ageing? Ordinary scans reveal the pace

Images hold clues to risk of dementia and various age-related diseases.

go.nature.com

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ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

Many thanks to my co-first author @maxwellelliott.bsky.social, Annchen Knodt, our awesome team at Duke and Otago, and my advisors Av Caspi, Terrie Moffitt, and Ahmad Hariri!

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

We want this measure to be available to the scientific community to help uncover how aging is related to disease, exposure, and interventions.

The algorithm to estimate DunedinPACNI is publicly available at github.com/etw11/Dunedi...

GitHub - etw11/DunedinPACNI: Code to estimate DunedinPACNI scores from FreeSurfer parcellations of brain MRI data.

Code to estimate DunedinPACNI scores from FreeSurfer parcellations of brain MRI data. - etw11/DunedinPACNI

github.com

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ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

DunedinPACNI is a novel, distinct approach to measuring aging from neuroimaging that can be easily estimated from simple measures from T1 MRI data.

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

DunedinPACNI tended to explain a bit more variance in clinical outcomes. Notably, this variance did not overlap with brain age gap very much and DunedinPACNI and brain age gap were not very correlated.

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

Lastly, we wanted to test whether DunedinPACNI was distinct from brain age gap, a neuroimaging biomarker trained on chronological age.

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

DunedinPACNI’s association with cognitive impairment in BrainLat was similar to that in ADNI, an initial indication of good generalization among people from Latin America.

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

Brain-based predictive models often fail when there are demographic differences between training and test samples – posing a hurdle for clinical translation. We tested if this was true for DunedinPACNI using the BrainLat dataset, a sample of Latin American adults with and without dementia.

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

In UK Biobank, faster DunedinPACNI scores were related to frailty, number of chronic illnesses, risk of new chronic illness, and risk of death from any cause. Thus, DunedinPACNI appears to index aging across the entire body

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

So, DunedinPACNI seems like a useful predictor of cognitive and brain decline. But what about aging more broadly?

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

Furthermore, faster DunedinPACNI scores at baseline predicted more rapid hippocampal atrophy in the future.

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ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

In ADNI and UK Biobank, faster DunedinPACNI scores were correlated with worse cognition, cognitive impairment, and risk of cognitive decline

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

Using Dunedin Study data, we trained an algorithm to estimate the Pace of Aging from brain structure. We call this measure “DunedinPACNI” – Pace of Aging Calculated from NeuroImaging

Then we applied this algorithm to external data to test its association with clinical outcomes.

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

We averaged the decline in each of these biomarkers to get a summary score of whole-body aging called “Pace of Aging”

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

First, we quantified longitudinal decline of 19 biomarkers of 6 different organ systems in members of the Dunedin Study, a cohort of 1037 people born in the same year and followed from birth until 45.

ethan whitman @ethanwhitman777.bsky.social · Jul 1

Learning from epigenetics, we wondered if we could build a “next-generation” neuroimaging measure that estimates the rate of biological aging across the entire body