Precision medicine in neurodegeneration: the IHI-PROMINENT project.

Neurodegenerative diseases are one of the most important contributors to morbidity and mortality in the elderly. In Europe, over 14 million people are currently living with dementia, at a cost of over 400 billion EUR annually. Recent advances in diagnostics and approval for new pharmaceutical treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common etiology of dementia, heralds the beginning of precision medicine in this field.

Visualization and Quantification of 3-Dimensional Stereotactic Surface Projections for 18F-Flutemetamol PET Using Variable Depth.

Unlabelled: Three-dimensional stereotactic surface projection (3D-SSP) is a widely used method for the analysis of clinical (18)F-FDG brain studies. However, for PET amyloid scans the use of 3D-SSP is challenging because of nonspecific uptake in white matter. Our objective was to implement a method for 3D-SSP quantification and visualization of (18)F-flutemetamol images that avoids extraction of white matter signal.

Blood protein predictors of brain amyloid for enrichment in clinical trials?

Background: Measures of neocortical amyloid burden (NAB) identify individuals who are at substantially greater risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). Blood-based biomarkers predicting NAB would have great utility for the enrichment of AD clinical trials, including large-scale prevention trials.

Methods: Nontargeted proteomic discovery was applied to 78 subjects from the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle Flagship Study of Ageing with a range of NAB values.

The empirical variance estimator for computer aided diagnosis: lessons for algorithm validation.

Computer aided diagnosis is an established field in medical image analysis; a great deal of effort goes into the development and refinement of pipelines to achieve greater performance. This improvement is dependent on reliable comparison, which is intimately related to variance estimation. For supervised methods, this can be confounded by statistical issues at the comparatively small sample sizes typical of the field.

The influence of biological and technical factors on quantitative analysis of amyloid PET: Points to consider and recommendations for controlling variability in longitudinal data.

In vivo imaging of amyloid burden with positron emission tomography (PET) provides a means for studying the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's and related diseases. Measurement of subtle changes in amyloid burden requires quantitative analysis of image data. Reliable quantitative analysis of amyloid PET scans acquired at multiple sites and over time requires rigorous standardization of acquisition protocols, subject management, tracer administration, image quality control, and image processing and analysis methods.