The effort to recruit and collect multidisciplinary data on a large number of subjects is ofmost benefit when attempting to use this information to provide practical guidelines forclinicians treating patients. In order to accomplish this, we will need to test the possibleinteractions among separate measures such as brain function, stress reactivity and underlyinggenetic structure. The purpose of this core will be to use a combination of model buildingtechniques, similar to those used in models of medical risk, and a comprehensive collection ofrelevant biological and clinical measurements to begin the process of developing reliablemodels of treatment response for depressed patients. We will use state-of-the-art variableselection techniques to build and validate a clinical model for overall and treatment-specificresponse, and evaluate its predictive ability through the use of statistical techniques. Inaddition, we will be incorporating genetic information, which will require specialized estimationtechniques in order to model the relationship with treatment response. Thus we will have astatistical geneticist (Michael Epstein, PhD) working closely with the core to provide expertiseand supervision for any treatment response related analyses, and a specific member of thecore designated for handling those techniques.
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