Seminars

General Departmental Seminar Series
JOINT STATISTICS/BIOSTATISTICS SEMINAR

Heritability Random Fields

Keith Worsley, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University

Wednesday, Oct 16, 2002, 4:00 pm

1221 Computer Sciences and Statistics Center - 1210 W. Dayton St.

ABSTRACT

The analysis of heritability, through the intraclass correlation coefficient, has a long history in statistics, dating back to the beginning of last century. We have recently acquired data from MRI images of the brains of twins and we want to know what parts of the brain are heritable. In other words, we wish to calculate the old-fashioned heritability coefficient at every point in a 3D image. The challenge is how to deal with this new type of data - the heritability random field. We use some new results on the geometry of random fields to set a threshold for these fields that allows us to detect those parts of the brain that are inherited, and those that are not.

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