Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, after Alzheimer’s disease, worldwide. At the NIST Lab, we are dedicated to explore potential structural biomarkers for the disease, as well as proposing image processing techniques for the surgical treatment of PD.
Projects include:
HIV enters the brain soon after seroconversion and potentially causes cognitive impairment. Although the incidence of severe dementia has been reduced, perhaps due to effective HIV treatment, the prevalence of mild to moderate cognitive impairment appears to be increasing. It has been reported that 30-50% of HIV+ patients with well-controlled infections show cognitive deficits. Several factors are thought to contribute to this brain injury. However, the literature has yet to produce a clear consensus of the mechanisms that may underlie brain injury.
At NIST, we have utilized novel neuroimaging methods with complementary strengths, deformation-based morphometry, voxel-based morphometry and cortical modeling, to investigate the effects HIV has on brain structure and function. Here, we observed regionally specific patterns of reduced cortical and subcortical volumes in the HIV+ group. White matter loss and subcortical atrophy was related a history of more severe immunosuppression, while cortical thickness reductions were related to poorer neuropsychological test performance. The findings suggest that distinct mechanisms may underlie cortical and subcortical injury, and argues for the potential importance of early HIV treatment in protecting long term brain health.
Abstracts and Conference Presentations:
R. Sanford, A.L. Fernandez Cruz, L.K. Fellows, B.M. Ances, D.L. Collins, Regionally Specific Cortical Thinning in HIV+ Patients in the cART Era, 2016 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), February 2016, Boston, Massachusetts (pdf)
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, which is the most common cause of dementia. Its prevalence for people aged 65-70 y is 1%, while it is 7% for the 75-84 y group, and 26% among those aged 90 and older. In Canada, persons over age 65 will make up to 15% of the population by 2016, but this amount is estimated to reach 23% by 2041. It is assumed that the prevalence of AD will quadruple by 2050 resulting in great financial burden.
It is believed that the pathophysiological process of AD begins well before the diagnosis of the dementia. Like many other neurodegenerative diseases, early treatment, before occurrence of too much irreversible degeneration of brain tissue, can be more effective. However, early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is currently almost impossible. The well-cited biomarker model that the structural MRI begins showing abnormality at the preclinical stage and rises significantly in MCI stage, which makes it an interesting candidate for prognosis of dementia onset. Our group with sophisticated image analysis techniques followed by statistical analysis tries to make the diagnosis and prediction possible at the level of an individual person.
Projects include:
