Research Description:
The primary focus of the lab is in developing Neuroimaging biomarkers to improve the accuracy and sensitivity of detecting neurodegenerative disease. These neuroimaging tools include structural morphometric analysis, statistical analysis, and shape analysis. In particular, Dr. King's laboratory has developed a novel three-dimensional fractal analysis paradigm to numerically quantify shape changes (complexity) in the cerebral cortex. It has been demonstrated that this method can distinguish Alzheimer's disease from Normal aging. However, there is still quite a bit of methodological development need to make this technique clinically relevant.
There are several projects that will be immediately available for interested medical students to work on. In brief:
A) Cerebral complexity in normal aging
- There are large changes that occur in brain volume and shape secondary to normal aging (without disease). These changes will need to be accounted for in order to identify the effects of disease (independent of age).
- This project uses a large database of brains from healthy adults from ages 20-89
- The project involves using performing image segmentation (volumetric analysis), followed by 3D fractal analysis
- The project will also implement advances methods of image co-registration to compare images between age groups
B) Cerebral complexity as a biomarker for different Neurodegenerative diseases
- It will be important for any neurodegenerative disease biomarker to identify different clinical entities as early as possible
- Studies have shown that patterns of neurodegeneration can be found
- This project will perform image segmentation and 3D fractal analysis on image of patients who have pathologically identified disease
- The ability of the 3D fractal measure to identify these diseases accurately will be determined
C) Correlation of cerebral complexity with Neuropsychiatric data
- How do the 3D fractal measures correlate with the current gold standard of clinical neuropsychiatric assessment?
- Can local variation in cerebral complexity serve as a biomarker?
- Do regional changes in fractal dimension have any clinical importance?
- This project will use data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative to look at relationships between these two factors.
D) Technological development of the 3D Fractal analysis software
- The 3D fractal analysis tool is a work in progress. Technological improvement in the rate of processing, user interface, and data output formats are needed to improve the functionality of the program
- This project will involve programming in C++ / Objective C
- The programming environment is Mac X-Code using OpenGL for the graphics
E) Integrating functional neuroimaging and pathological neuroimaging with structural and complexity measures.
- It is likely that no single biomarker will contain enough power for prospective categorization. In addition, it will be critical to compare different (hopefully complementary) biomarkers to each other to determine which ones are the most useful.
-There are several other very interesting neuroimaging biomarkers that are available for comparison. These include metabolic imaging with FDG-PET and pathological imaging with an amyloid binding agent (AV45 PET).
- This project will involve developing methods for integrating multiple modalities. This will be done in collaboration with the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute as well as the Center for Alzheimer's Care, Imaging, and Research.
Does this research involve human subjects or animals? No
If yes, what is the protocol number?
10/2009
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