As reflected in recent budget increases in the National Institutes of Health, and in line with the National Alzheimer?s Project Act, there is a need to enhance and leverage resources to decrease dementia disparities and change the trajectory of Alzheimer?s disease and related dementias. To fill this gap, we seek to enhance the University of California Davis Alzheimer?s Disease Center (UCD ADC), which contains a diverse ethnoracial cohort (having Hispanic, Black, and non-Hispanic White decedents), through implementation of digital pathology within our Neuropathology Core. This implementation will allow for rapid transmission of pathological data for consultation and collaborations, distribution of materials for educational purposes, tissue specimen archiving, and image analysis. In addition, by having a digital pathology with immunofluorescent capabilities will allow for viewing of the distribution (including overlap) of multiple proteins at one time within a tissue specimen. This can enhance biological studies by providing spatial relationships of proteins resulting in a deeper phenotype of disease. This supplement application is designed to support equipment and leverage and enhance infrastructure to allow the UCD ADC the ability to 1) purchase a whole slide image system to digitize existing and future histologically stained samples 2) leverage and enhance current servers and database systems to allow for storage and rapid retrieval of digital images and their data and 3) leverage and enhance hardware to develop and deploy pipelines for quantitative computational methodologies for pathologies found within a diverse ethnoracial cohort of Alzheimer?s disease brains. The UCD ADC continues to excel and expand in its research initiatives to collect and provide brain specimens and pathological data on a diverse population of individuals at various stages of cognitive ability and dementia risk. This supplement will further enable suitable infrastructure for enhancement of current collaborations and facilitate emerging collaborations by providing a means to share and analysis pathology on digitized whole slide images.
Digital microscopy paired with machine learning algorithms has aided in diagnosis and provide more quantitative pathology data to unlock the secrets of diseases. These technologies are needed within the dementia field, specifically in diverse cohorts, as disease presentations may differ. By implementing state of the art imaging systems and analysis, the goals of this supplement are to enhance the ADC?s ability to provide greater access to high quality pathological data for educational, consultation and collaborative purposes, infrastructure to pursue digital solutions for more quantitative analysis, and safe secure storage of histologic specimens.
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