PhD candidate Lodewijk Brand, and two undergraduate students Braedon O’Callaghan and Anthony Sun received a “Best Paper” award for their paper at the 20th Annual BioInformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE) conference. The work was presented virtually on Tuesday, October 27, 2020.

This is the first coauthored paper for both Braedon and Anthony with the MInDS@Mines team. Congratulations!

This research designed a novel objective function that combines modalities from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) while jointly performing a classification task. Modality fusion is performed via simultaneous matrix factorization across the provided neuroimaging and genetic modalities. The authors identify existing biomarkers that have been shown to be related to cognitive decline. In addition, their approach identifies additional genetic variants, on Chromosome 10, that may provide novel insight into the development of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Code for the method is provided here.