Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Beyond Scalar Treatment: A Causal Analysis of Hippocampal Atrophy on
  Behavioral Deficits in Alzheimer's Studies   Alzheimer's disease is a progressive form of dementia that results in
problems with memory, thinking and behavior. It often starts with abnormal
aggregation and deposition of beta-amyloid and tau, followed by neuronal damage
such as atrophy of the hippocampi, and finally leads to behavioral deficits.
Despite significant progress in finding biomarkers associated with behavioral
deficits, the underlying causal mechanism remains largely unknown. Here we
investigate whether and how hippocampal atrophy contributes to behavioral
deficits based on a large-scale observational study conducted by the
Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). As a key novelty, we use 2D
representations of the hippocampi, which allows us to better understand atrophy
associated with different subregions. It, however, introduces methodological
challenges as existing causal inference methods are not well suited for
exploiting structural information embedded in the 2D exposures. Moreover, our
data contain more than 6 million clinical and genetic covariates, necessitating
appropriate confounder selection methods. We hence develop a novel two-step
causal inference approach tailored for our ADNI data application. Analysis
results suggest that atrophy of CA1 and subiculum subregions may cause more
severe behavioral deficits compared to CA2 and CA3 subregions. We further
evaluate our method using simulations and provide theoretical guarantees.

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The categories of this paper are: solv-int
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The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
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The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
1
The categories of this paper are: cs
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
30
The categories of this paper are: q-alg
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
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The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
8
The categories of this paper are: hep-ex