Identification and statistical analysis for risk factors for vision loss and bone loss by joint analysis of genetic, imaging and biomedical data

Project Summary

Vision loss and bone loss are two major disorders in older adults because of aging. Previous studies have investigated potential risk factors that contribute to these disorders. However, most of the previous studies did not take advantage of imaging data and thus only limited risk factors were identified. The causal effects of risk factors were also poorly understood. We propose to include imaging, genetic and other biomedical data into analysis (so called ‘joint analysis’) and use statistical and machine learning methods to identify new risk factors for vision loss and bone loss, respectively, and carefully evaluate their causal effects.