Providing Alzheimer's disease brain scan data to other researchers

Lead Investigator: Dr Jonathan Schott
Institution: Institute of Neurology, University College London
Grant type: Dissemination grant
Duration: 1 year
Amount: £19,930

Scientific Title: Minimal Interval Resonance Imaging in Alzheimer's disease and normal ageing (MIRIAD): disseminating a unique imaging database to the Alzheimer's disease research community

What do we already know?

Dr Schott was previously an Alzheimer's Society Clinical Research Fellow, working on a project that used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) brain scans of people with Alzheimer's disease to analyse measures related to the volume of different areas of the brain.

As part of this project, Dr Schott took brain scans of trial participants over several different time periods, ranging from repeat scans within the same day to scans over a two-year period.

This project involved 69 participants, 46 of whom had Alzheimer's disease. As well as undergoing brain scans, all participants also completed clinical and neuropsychological assessments at the beginning of the study.

What does this project involve?

As a result of this comprehensive study, Dr Schott has a wealth of data, from both the MRI scans and the assessments of each participant. The dissemination grant will allow him to make all of this brain scan information and data available as a 'training data set'.

The analysis of brain scan data within the area of dementia research has greatly improved in recent years. However, in order to test new analysis techniques, training data sets must be used so that researchers know how reliable their technique is. There is currently no comprehensive and large data set available for this training, and so Dr Schott proposes to make the MIRIAD data available for this purpose.

How will this benefit people with dementia?

This will provide an extremely important tool for dementia researchers all over the world, and will help to advance techniques used to analyse brain images and so gain further understanding of how dementia develops and progresses.