Clinical Science Brown Bag: Network Analysis of Clinical Data

Abstract:
Functional neuroimaging, daily diaries, social interactions, physiological monitoring, and ambulatory assessments (among other methods) provide clinically-relevant time series data. Too often in the clinical and social sciences, however, these data are aggregated across people and time, and information about dynamics and individuality is lost. In this talk, I will present a network analysis option for examination of time series data; the method quantifies temporal processes and heterogeneity. After introducing the method and demonstrating its validity, I will provide two examples in which it is applied to clinical data. The first will showcase person-specific behavioral networks derived from the daily diaries of individuals with personality pathology. The second will reveal the influence of prenatal hormones on brain function in individuals with disorders of sex development.

Bio:
Adriene Beltz is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Methods, Sex differences, and Development – M(SD) – Lab. She is a quantitative developmentalist interested in creating and implementing innovative time-indexed analyses to understand how sex hormones influence brain and behavioral sex differences across the lifespan. Before coming to U-M, Dr. Beltz completed a post doc at Penn State University in the Quantitative Development unit of the department of Human Development and Family Studies, focusing on connectivity analysis approaches for functional neuroimaging data. Dr. Beltz also received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Penn State, specializing in Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.