This proposal describes a plan for the UCSF Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) to expand its educational offerings through the establishment of an independent Education and Information core. UCSF is committed to integrating current advancements in the understanding of dementia to support education and Dromote research collaboration. To further these commitments, UCSF proposes the creation of an online environment that will foster collaboration and communication between geographically distributed dementia and neurodegenerative disease research experts, improve the quality and quantity of our educational materials and share the benefits our improved educational materials with the greater research and clinical communities. To accomplish these goals, we plan to 1) augment our online compendium of videotaped behavioral neurological findings, 2) compile detailed online case studies, including videotaped clinical materials, digital textual histories, brain imaging, genetic pedigree, laboratory data and pathology (when available) and 3) enhance the value of both the neurological findings and the detailed case studies with expert commentary from researchers around the country. To support these offerings, we will implement a content management system to handle the unique media assets (video clips, digital text, digital images, digital audio, etc.). This widely-available system will enhance the reach and scope of our educational offerings. This system could be extended to support the digital collections of other ADRCs. The clinical materials managed by this system could easily be integrated with the variables collected for the ADRC Uniform Dataset (UDS) both within and across centers to add value to these measures. Additionally, this resource would provide the opportunity for enhancing collaboration among ADRCs. Experts from seven other ADRCs have already agreed to participate in online case teleconferences and provide commentary that will be catalogued with each corresponding case. By making distributed participation possible, this system would enhance distributed collaboration and allow for the joint development of educational materials, and ultimately enhance diagnostic reliability across dementia research centers by allowing researchers to compare diagnostic impressions on the same cases. ? ? ?
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