Figure 1

A conceptual bioinformatic framework for enabling biomarker discovery and diagnosis in Alzheimer's disease. The biophysical, biochemical and statistical models are used to integrate information from intermediate phenotypes, such as those obtained from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or from serum metabolomics, with the molecular networks. The models relate changes in specific components of the networks with the specific changes in measured intermediate phenotypes (red and blue lines, respectively). These models then inform biomarker discovery and thus diagnosis because they can be used to predict clinical phenotypes from intermediate phenotypes and biomarkers.