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Approved Research

Reliable neural signatures in major depressive disorder: A machine-learning investigation of a large dataset.

Principal Investigator: Dr Paul Hamilton
Approved Research ID: 49037
Approval date: October 26th 2020

Lay summary

Major depression is a debilitating disorder with significant personal and societal consequences. Neuroimaging investigations of depression have held promise but have, so far, failed to identify reliably the neural underpinnings of this disorder. A given neuroimaging study of depression is most often small, comprising 20 depressed and 20 healthy subjects. This makes individual studies potentially insensitive to detecting subtle effects in the imaging data. In the current project, we propose to apply cutting-edge machine learning approaches to the significant neuroimaging data resources of the UK Biobank in order to identify a neural signature of depression that will expedite the diagnosis, prediction, and treatment of this disease. We expect the proposed investigation to take three years.