Data Valorization (DATAVAL)

Group Leader: Dr. Susan Mérillat

DATAVAL is dedicated to transforming HLC’s complex research data into actionable knowledge and innovation to promote healthy longevity and well-being across the life course. The group develops and maintains infrastructure and workflows for efficient, secure and sustainable longitudinal data management. It enables data harmonization, augmentation, integration, and advanced analytics to power cutting-edge research. By fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and building partnerships with industry and public stakeholders, DATAVAL enhances research visibility, participation and societal impact. In line with the paradigm shift towards a contextualized person focus – proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) – DATAVAL prepares the (data) grounds for the development of context aware decision support systems advancing advance individualized, just-in-time, contextualized interventions (from "one size fits all" towards "the right size for the right person at the right time").

Projects

LIFEstreams (coming soon)

Longitudinal Healthy Aging Brain (LHAB) Database Project (coming soon)

Multimodal Data Integration (coming soon)

Selected Publications

Wang, R., Rossetto, L., Mérillat, S., Röcke, C., Martin, M., & Bernstein, A. (2025). Deep Generative Model-Based Generation of Synthetic Individual-Specific Brain MRI Segmentations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12352

Deschwanden, P. F., Lopez Piñeiro, A., Hotz, I., Malagurski, B., Mérillat, S., & Jäncke, L. (2024). Influence of atlas-choice on age and time effects in large-scale brain networks in the context of healthy aging. Imaging Neuroscience, 2, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag_a_00127

Hotz, I., Deschwanden, P. F., Liem, F., Mérillat, S., Malagurski, B., Kollias, S., & Jäncke, L. (2022). Performance of three freely available methods for extracting white matter hyperintensities: FreeSurfer, UBO Detector, and BIANCA. Human brain mapping, 43(5), 1481–1500. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25739

Jockwitz, C., Mérillat, S., Liem, F., Oschwald, J., Amunts, K., Jäncke, L., & Caspers, S. (2021). Generalizing Longitudinal Age Effects on Brain Structure - A Two-Study Comparison Approach. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 15, 635687. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.635687

Oschwald, J., Guye S., Liem, F., Rast, P., Willis, S., Röcke, C., Jäncke, L., Martin, M., Mérillat ,S. (2019) Brain structure and cognitive ability in healthy aging: a review on longitudinal correlated change. Reviews in the Neurosciences, 31(1), 1-57. https://doi.org/10.1515/revneuro-2018-0096