PI: Andrew Saykin
Institution: Indiana University

Overview:

The Indiana Alzheimer Disease Center (IADC) was established in 1991 to bring investigators and institutional resources at the Indiana University School of Medicine together to address the fundamental causes and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias. The overarching goal of the IADC is to support the U.S. National Plan for AD (National Alzheimer’s Project Act, NAPA) to prevent and effectively treat AD by 2025 through innovative research on etiology, early detection, and therapeutics. Over a course of more than two decades, the IADS has established a well-characterized and longitudinal clinical cohort for AD research. In the current funding period, state-of-the-art multimodal MRI (high resolution structural and 3D pCASL perfusion, multiband resting-state and task-based fMRI, and diffusion MRI optimized for structural and functional connectome analysis) will be performed on all eligible IADC participants, as well as amyloid and/or tau PET on 225 IADC participants. To extract robust biomarkers from these advanced imaging data, IADC will collaborate with LONIR P41 to leverage the advanced computational tools developed by the TR&Ds of LONIR. In this service project, the novel algorithms from TR&D2 will provide powerful tools to analyze the connectomes of IACD cohorts using the diffusion MRI data. The novel surface mapping tools from TR&D3 will allows more accurate tracking of anatomical changes in the preclinical phase of AD, and the fusion of multimodal imaging data collected at IADC. With these advanced imaging measures, we can more accurately examine imaging-pathologic correlation to improve our understanding of early structural, functional, and molecular changes observed in vivo and help identify novel therapeutic targets. The cross-modality image analyses will also improve our imaging genetics studies that will contribute to advances in early detection, mechanistic understanding, and optimized use of imaging as a dynamic biomarker for the study of AD.