Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by the presence of amyloid and tau pathology. PET imaging can reveal the amount and localization of these abnormal proteins in the brain. While amyloid PET imaging shows minimal regional variability, regional uptake patterns of tau PET are informative of different neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. AD vs Frontotemporal dementia) and AD clinical subtypes.
The ALFA+ cohort of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation is formed by 419 healthy individuals at higher risk of developing AD. One hundred of them have undergone tau PET imaging and amyloid PET, MRI and biomarker determinations are available.
This project aims to optimize several quantification approaches to estimate the regional pattern of amyloid tau in ALFA+ participants. Pipelines have already been designed in MatLab and in the SPM environment. However, several steps are pending to decide upon the optimal quantification to maximize the sensitivity to very early changes in tau pathology in the ALFA+ cohort. This is an interesting project for students interested in image processing and the design of neuroimaging processing pipelines applied to the field of Alzheimer’s disease in one of the most relevant cohorts for AD research, globally.

This project is in collaboration with Fundació Pasqual Maragall.