Yichen Zhang
My research direction is mainly to use neuroimaging methods to detect the neural mechanisms of psychiatric patients. My PhD project will focus on the neural mechanisms of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) patients with different genotype of 5-HTTLPR and effect of rTMS treatment. I will put up a research pipeline for the three different imaging methods (fMRI, DIT, T1) separately and compare baseline brain differences in the healthy controls and the TRD patients. Given that every brain imaging method provides different but complementary information, I will use surface-based multimodel imaging analysis methods to combine structural and functional data to better understand the neurobiological dysfunctions of TRD patients. To better understand the rTMS treatment effect of TRD patients, I will combine multimodal brain imaging metrics and genotype of 5-HTTLPR using the machine learning algorithms to identify the sensitive neuroimaging biomarker for prediction of clinical outcomes of aiTBS treatment.
Keywords: depression, surface-based multimodel imaging, gene