ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the study of cognitive decline and brain imaging for precision medicine, and is based on data from the North American Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative cohort. It aims to identify clusters of subjects with different susceptibility to cognitive decline, based on repeated cognitive scores and baseline Magnetic Resonance Imaging volumetric data. In particular, longitudinal data are a key resource for precision medicine when applied to chronic diseases; giving insight into the complex patterns of disease progression, quantifying time-varying exposure to treatments, or facilitating the development of individual-level dynamic disease prediction tools, updated as new biomarker information is collected. Precision medicine is an emerging field that aims to improve disease prevention and treatment by accounting for individual variations in genes, lifestyle and environment. Statistical tools commonly used for precision medicine purposes include clustering methods, regression modelling, a variable selection and dimension reduction techniques.
