A Study of Neuroimaging and Genetic Non-linear Associations For Brain Development

During the transition from childhood to adulthood, the human brain undergoes significant developmental changes that facilitate cognitive maturation, driven by a complex interplay of environmental and genetic factors. Despite abundant studies on neuroimaging for brain development, the specific genetic influences remain unclear. Using brain age estimation, we categorized individuals (N = 7,435, aged 9-10 years) from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) cohort into groups exhibiting either accelerated or delayed brain maturation. This study examines brain imaging and genetic associations within this subpopulation to identify the genetic influences on brain development. We have compared linear association using Sparse Canonical Correlation Analysis (sCCA)-base model and non-linear association with Supervised Contrastive Joint Latent Representation Network (SC-JLRN). Developmentally relevant nonlinear latent patterns between genetic variants highly expressed in the cerebellum and brain regions significantly associated with brain age (cerebellar-hippocamp-frontal circuitry) were extracted.