Research Overview

The Brain Imaging–Disease Risk Atlas project aims to uncover how structural and functional features of the human brain relate to the risk of developing diseases across multiple organ systems. Leveraging multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and linked hospital records from ~60,000 participants in the UK Biobank (Application No. 194287), this work systematically mapped associations between 505 brain imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs) and 756 incident diseases, establishing the largest population-based atlas of brain–disease relationships to date.

Brain imaging metrics were derived from three core modalities—T1-weighted structural MRI, diffusion MRI, and resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI)—and included measures of cortical thickness, cortical surface area, cortical volume, subcortical volume, white-matter integrity (fractional anisotropy [FA] and mean diffusivity [MD]), and functional connectivity (Nodes and Edges). Disease outcomes were defined using hospital inpatient records linked to the National Health Service (NHS) and harmonized according to the Phecode Map v1.2, providing 756 clinically meaningful phenotypes across 15 disease chapters.

Using a phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) framework based on Cox proportional hazards models, we identified 1,500 significant brain–disease pairs after stringent Bonferroni correction. In addition to the overall analysis, this platform now includes sex-stratified results for female and male participants, as well as sex interaction results to help identify brain–disease associations that may differ between females and males. 

You can access and download the results of interest using the options in the left panel, including overall results, female-specific results, male-specific results, and sex interaction results. Results can be browsed "By Brain IDP" or "By Disease", where applicable. Details about the project and methods can be found in our paper.

If you use any results, figures, or insights from this website, please cite both the associated paper and this website.

Yu J, Liu Q, et al. Atlas of the Human Brain Imaging-derived Phenotypes and Disease Risk. Med, in press.

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