Imaging genomics Paul

Introduction Imaging genetics is a rapidly emerging field that is opening up a new landscape of discovery in medicine and neuroscience. The field is a hybrid effort that merges methods anddiscoveries in both imaging and genetics; its power has recently taken a quantum leap for a number of reasons. First, many groups worldwide are scanning thousands of individuals with structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Samples are now large enough to discover and verify effects of specific genes on the brain [1–3]. Second, voxel-wise genomicmethods are emerging that search every location in a brain image for statistical effects of genes [4 ]. These approaches identify coherent anatomical patterns of gene effects in 3D. Replication efforts can then focus on selected brain measures that show promise in preliminary analyses.