LMA Semiar, Dr Joe Bathelt
Connecting brain and behaviour in clinical neuroscience — a network approach
Abstract: Current diagnostic systems of mental disorders, like ICD-11 and DSM5, are largely based on expert consensus and tradition. Research over the last 50 years showed that there is considerable overlap between the diagnostic groups and that individuals within diagnostic groups may present with very different symptoms. Besides making targeted treatment more difficult, this heterogeneity poses a significant obstacle for research into genetic and neural mechanisms of mental disorders. Alternative dimensional approaches provide a better characterisation of the data but are impractical for clinical use. This talk will present alternative machine-learning and clustering methods that can help to identify subgroups of participants that are maximally homogeneous and maximally distinct. Best practices and applications in clinical and neuroimaging research will be discussed.
Bio: Dr Bathelt completed his undergraduate studies in Biology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and obtained a Master’s degree in Neuroscience from University College London. Subsequently, he pursued a doctoral degree under the supervision of Prof Michelle de Haan and Prof Chris Clark at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. There, his work focused on the neurocognitive development of children with congenital visual disorders. Following his doctorate, Dr Bathelt received research fellowships to investigate brain mechanisms of atypical development at the MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, and the University of Amsterdam. He was appointed as a tenure-track lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, in July 2020.
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