February 2006 Charleston SCASA Meeting

March 24th, 2006
Charleston SCASA Meeting

Location: Zeus Grill and Seafood
721 Johnnie Dodds Blvd, Mount Pleasant, SC29464

6:00 pm Registration and Happy Hour (cash bar)
7:00 pm Dinner (Greek Buffet) $15 non-students, $11 students
8:00 pm Guest Speaker: Peng Huang

A latent structural model for postural instability process in Parkinson′s disease
(a talk for a general statistical audience )

The onset of postural instability (PI) is a key hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD) progression. Since the true PI status is not clinically observable, it is assessed through a surrogate binary outcome. The biological feature of the PI process is that the process is inexorably decline, i.e., it is difficult to reverse by current known medications although a temperate relieve of symptom could be observed. However, the large inter rater variability leads to inconsistent results that contradict the irreversible nature of the PI process, making it difficult to determine whether a patient has lost postural reflexes. A novel Brownian motion based latent structure model is proposed that not only incorporates patient's multiple onset times, but also captures the specific variation structure of the PI process as well. The proposed model does not require even spaced visiting schedules. Two Bayesian diagnostic and outlier detection methods are proposed. The methodology is demonstrated through a PD clinical trial data.

Contact Matteo Bottai for more information.
Please RSVP by 3:00pm Thursday, March 23rd