Neuroimaging Core

ABSTRACT – ALLFTD2: NEUROIMAGING CORE Brain imaging serves a critical role in dementia research, including its use for diagnosis and staging of multiple neurodegenerative disorders and enrichment of study groups for clinical trials. In the earliest stages of neurodegenerative disease, imaging and other biomarkers may be the only measures that can be used to quantify drug effects in clinical trials, and imaging may inform the use of approved treatments. The ALLFTD Neuroimaging Core (NIC), therefore, serves a central role in ALLFTD, and the larger FTLD research community, by ensuring harmonized collection and distribution of high-quality imaging data. During the first cycle of ALLFTD, the NIC has coordinated the acquisition of MRI data within this multisite study, including managing the expansion of acquisition from the original 18 sites to the current 28 sites (will be 27 sites in ALLFTD2), and supervising the creation of a repository containing 3961 images from 2008 participants with familial (f-) and sporadic (s-) FTLD. The images are publicly available to any investigator through the Laboratory of NeuroImaging (LONI). All of these images were acquired under the supervision of the Mayo Clinic to ensure the best possible balance of advanced analytic capability and compatibility of images over time, and compatibility with images collected for other large multisite studies. To address participant privacy, ALLFTD has developed methods for incorporating MRI deidentification, including header stripping and image defacing, into the archiving process, and was one of the first multisite studies to routinely implement these approaches with LONI. The NIC also generates standardized atlas-based volumes for each participant that are incorporated into the ALLFTD database and available to any investigator. In the coming cycle, the NIC will continue to be responsible for the acquisition, quality control (QC), and processing of harmonized MRI scans collected through ALLFTD. Protocols will optimally utilize the scanner capabilities at each study site, maximizing the use of advanced sequences. We will provide specific MRI based measurements to Projects 1 and 2 to address their hypotheses, and work with the other ALLFTD Cores to ensure that imaging data are well integrated with data coming from these other ALLFTD resources.