The purpose of this application is to establish an Imaging Core for the Northwestern Alzheimer?s Disease Center (ADC) to enhance research activities on aging and dementia within and outside of Northwestern University.
The Aims of this proposal are to: 1) Initiate a Imaging Core in our current cycle focusing on the spectrum from healthy cognitive aging to dementia, including the FTLD-spectrum of disorders using imaging modalities that will yield optimal quantitative information on brain structure (MP-RAGE), white matter integrity (FLAIR), axonal pathways (dMRI), resting state hemodynamic fluctuations for establishing functional connectivity (rs-fMRI), blood flow (ASL) as well as amyloid and tau binding (amyloid-PET, tau-PET). 2) Establish a secure database, automated pipelines for processing imaging files, and tools for exploring and accessing the data to facilitate data analysis in order to leverage projects of our collaborators and to contribute to multi-center data repositories such as the National Alzheimer?s Coordinating Center (NACC). 3) Integrate imaging parameters with clinical and post-mortem information on Clinical Core subjects in a unified database so that control subjects can be more fully characterized, patient groups have more solid diagnostic information and clinico- pathologic correlations can be guided by pre-mortem imaging biomarkers. Nearly all aspects of the Northwestern ADC will be enhanced by the availability of the Imaging Core. For example, the diagnostic, anatomical and physiological characterization of Clinical Core subjects who participate in collaborative studies will be improved and all clinical investigations at the Northwestern ADC will be able to access more sophisticated tools for correlating imaging markers with behavioral and clinical parameters. The Imaging Core will unburden researchers using Clinical Core subjects from the need to gather ad hoc imaging data and will add a new dimension to clinicopathologic investigations of autopsy specimens. Thus, the range of hypotheses that can be addressed by collaborative projects relying on Northwestern ADC resources will be increased. An additional and consequential benefit will be to create new training and research opportunities for young investigators and clinicians at the Northwestern ADC. The imaging data generated by this proposal will also improve the amount of available multimodal data available in NACC, which will benefit extramural research.
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