TransferGWAS of T1-weighted Brain MRI Data from the UK Biobank

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) traditionally analyze single traits, e.g., disease diagnoses or biomarkers. Nowadays, large-scale cohorts such as the UK Biobank (UKB) collect imaging data with sample sizes large enough to perform genetic association testing. Typical approaches to GWAS on high-dimensional modalities extract predefined features from the data, e.g., volumes of regions of interest. This limits the scope of such studies to predefined traits and can ignore novel patterns present in the data. TransferGWAS employs deep neural networks (DNNs) to extract low-dimensional representations of imaging data for GWAS, eliminating the need for predefined biomarkers. Here, we apply transferGWAS on brain MRI data from the UKB. We encoded 36, 311 T1-weighted brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans using DNN models trained on MRI scans from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, and on natural images from the ImageNet dataset, and performed a multivariate GWAS on the resulting features. Furthermore, we fitted polygenic scores (PGS) of the deep features and computed genetic correlations between them and a range of selected phenotypes. We identified 289 independent loci, associated mostly with bone density, brain, or cardiovascular traits, and 14 regions having no previously reported associations. We evaluated the PGS in a multi-PGS setting, improving predictions of several traits. By examining clusters of genetic correlations, we found novel links between diffusion MRI traits and type 2 diabetes. 1 Author SummaryGenome-wide association studies are a popular framework for identifying regions in the genome influencing a trait of interest. At the same time, the growing sample sizes of medical imaging datasets allow for their incorporation into such studies. However, due to high dimensionalities of imaging modalities, association testing cannot be performed directly on the raw data. Instead, one would extract a set of measurements from the images, typically using predefined algorithms, which has several drawbacks - it requires specialized software, which might not be available for new or less popular modalities, and can ignore features in the data, if they have not yet been defined. An alternative approach is to extract the features using pretrained deep neural network models, which are well suited for complex high-dimensional data and have the potential to uncover patterns not easily discoverable by manual human analysis. Here, we extracted deep feature representations of brain MRI scans from the UK Biobank, and performed a genome-wide association study on them. Besides identifying genetic regions with previously reported associations with brain phenotypes, we found novel regions, as well as ones related to several other traits such as bone mineral density or cardiovascular traits.