AUTHOR=Da Mota Benoit , Tudoran Radu , Costan Alexandru , Varoquaux Gaël , Brasche Goetz , Conrod Patricia , Lemaitre Hervé , Paus Tomas , Rietschel Marcella , Frouin Vincent , Poline Jean-Baptiste , Antoniu Gabriel , Thirion Bertrand TITLE=Generic Machine Learning Pattern for Neuroimaging-Genetic Studies in the Cloud JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroinformatics VOLUME=8 YEAR=2014 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroinformatics/articles/10.3389/fninf.2014.00031 DOI=10.3389/fninf.2014.00031 ISSN=1662-5196 ABSTRACT=

Brain imaging is a natural intermediate phenotype to understand the link between genetic information and behavior or brain pathologies risk factors. Massive efforts have been made in the last few years to acquire high-dimensional neuroimaging and genetic data on large cohorts of subjects. The statistical analysis of such data is carried out with increasingly sophisticated techniques and represents a great computational challenge. Fortunately, increasing computational power in distributed architectures can be harnessed, if new neuroinformatics infrastructures are designed and training to use these new tools is provided. Combining a MapReduce framework (TomusBLOB) with machine learning algorithms (Scikit-learn library), we design a scalable analysis tool that can deal with non-parametric statistics on high-dimensional data. End-users describe the statistical procedure to perform and can then test the model on their own computers before running the very same code in the cloud at a larger scale. We illustrate the potential of our approach on real data with an experiment showing how the functional signal in subcortical brain regions can be significantly fit with genome-wide genotypes. This experiment demonstrates the scalability and the reliability of our framework in the cloud with a 2 weeks deployment on hundreds of virtual machines.