Qiong Wu, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics and health data science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, has received an R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health — part of the National Institutes of Health — to develop new statistical methods for studying brain aging in people with severe mental illness.
The project, “Federated Statistical Harmonization and Multivariate Modeling of Brain Aging Trajectories in Severe Mental Diseases,” began Aug. 1 and will continue through May 31, 2031. The award will provide $739,727 in total funding during its first year.
The project aims to develop statistical frameworks that allow researchers at multiple institutions to harmonize and analyze neuroimaging data collaboratively while keeping individual patient data to remain at each participating site.
By accounting for site-to-site differences in neuroimaging data arising from variations in imaging technologies and data collection practices, Wu’s methods will help researchers more accurately investigate how severe mental illness affects brain aging and how metabolic syndrome may influence those changes.
“Many institutions have valuable neuroimaging data, but analyzing data across institutions can be challenging because of site-to-site differences in how the imaging data are collected and concerns about sharing sensitive patient information,” said Wu. “Our goal is to develop methods that allow researchers to collaborate and learn from data across multiple institutions while keeping individual-level data at each institution.”
The new approaches will help researchers integrate and analyze complex brain imaging data more accurately, improving the ability to identify meaningful changes in the brain and produce more reliable research findings.
Ultimately, the research could provide new insights into the relationship between severe mental illness, metabolic health and brain aging while making large-scale neuroimaging collaborations more efficient and accessible.
“I’m especially excited to receive this award as an Early Stage Investigator,” Wu said. “It is incredibly rewarding to see the potential impact of this work recognized and to have the opportunity to develop tools that can benefit researchers studying brain health around the world.”
The project will also produce user-friendly statistical tools that enable researchers to integrate and analyze distributed neuroimaging data using summary statistics, helping advance collaborative brain health research without compromising patient privacy.
-Ava Dzurenda