Clinical background

The interplay between genetic risk factors, environmental influence and immune profile make ASD appear as a highly heterogeneous disorder. ARIANNA aims to identify disease-specific imaging patterns as intermediate phenotypes, which will enlighten the connections between the neurobiological substrate of ASD and its final complex phenotype.

The complexity and heterogeneity of ASD requires dedicated multivariate analysis techniques to get the most from the interrelationship among the many variables that describe affected individuals, spanning from clinical phenotypic characterization and genetic profile to structural and functional brain images. The ARIANNA research team will develop and validate new effective methods to analyse neuroimaging data acquired in multiple sites, and multivariate approaches to handle multimodal information allowing for partially missing data.