SCAN: Standardized Centralized Alzheimer's and Related Dementias Neuroimaging

项目总结

PROJECT SUMMARY Amyloid PET is central to a biological definition of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and has been integrated heavily into the research setting since the first PIB-PET scans in 2004. The SCAN-Amyloid Legacy (SCAN-AL) Project will leverage already established research programs (SCAN, NACC, LONI) along with extensive work that has been conducted over the previous 15 years at the ADRC site level to implement and collect expensive and valuable amyloid PET data on ADRC research participants. The ultimate goal of this effort is to curate and harmonize pre-existing amyloid PET data collected across ADRC sites to create a large-scale resource that can be disseminated to the ADRC community for use in various research endeavors. More specifically, during this award period we will aim to curate 3000 amyloid PET scans, which is similar to the number of amyloid PET scans currently available through ADNI, and to link this data to extensive data already available on these participants (clinical and cognitive data, biofluid data, postmortem data, etc). Whereas the parent SCAN award focuses on processing of prospective PET and MRI data utilizing rigorous standardization methods both during image acquisition and post-acquisition processing, SCAN-AL will allow more flexibility to enable the specific goal of obtaining legacy amyloid PET data on as many unique ADRC Clinical Core participants as possible. This work is significant because we are quickly approaching 2025 and still lack a disease modifying treatment for AD. The data leveraging proposed herein extends the value of the considerable funding has been directed towards cohort studies of AD to contribute towards this goal of curing AD by 2025. Increasing the utilization of pre-existing amyloid PET dataset across ADRCs is particularly significant and unique compared to other large-scale efforts such as ADNI, given the heterogeneity in ADRC participants both in terms of clinical diagnoses and demographics. Whereas ADNI focuses specifically on normal aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD diagnoses, the ADRC program recruits participants spanning a range of neurodegenerative diseases that reflect the focus and expertise of local investigators, such as vascular disease, frontotemporal dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal syndrome, Parkinson’s, etc. Further, the ADRC program is unique in that a broad range of demographics regarding race, ethnicity, and age are reflected. We anticipate that the SCAN-AL Project will contribute to timely scientific opportunities related to the validation of plasma AD biomarkers, support innovative analyses that require large datasets such as work with genetics and machine learning, as well as enable the investigation of rare phenotypes that are difficult to collect at one site alone. This effort will provide ample opportunities to AD investigators and complement the efforts of the SCAN initiative.