ADNI data is made available to researchers around the world. As such, there are many active research projects accessing and applying the shared ADNI data. To further encourage Alzheimer’s disease research collaboration, and to help prevent duplicate efforts, the list below shows the specific research focus of the active ADNI investigations. This information is requested annually as a requirement for data access.
| Principal Investigator | |
| Principal Investigator's Name: | Ziwei Zhang |
| Institution: | Duke University |
| Department: | Radiology |
| Country: | |
| Proposed Analysis: | Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is currently the 6th leading cause of death in the United States and is projected to become a major public health problem worldwide as the global population ages. There is currently no effect therapy to significantly alter the course of the disease. Early diagnosis is believed to be critical for clinical trials of new therapeutics, as well as in current AD management. Quantitative structural MRI shows great potential for differential diagnosis in dementia and for predicting clinical conversion of patients with mild cognitive Impairment (MCI) to AD, thus a potentially important imaging biomarker for early AD. Though the technique has been used in research for over 15 years, adoption into clinical practice has been slow because of the labor-intensive and time consuming manual segmentation steps. A recently FDA-cleared fully automated brain segmentation and volumetry software package, NeuroQuant™ (NQ,) has shown comparable performance to the gold standard of manual segmentation in detecting brain atrophy. The predictive efficacy of this tool in MCI, a clinically important at-risk population for AD, has not yet been rigorously tested. The purpose of this study is to assess the diagnostic test characteristics of NQ metrics for predicting MCI to AD conversion. In this prospective database study, we plan to test the diagnostic performance of NQ metrics on a consecutive sample of MCI subjects drawn from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. |
| Additional Investigators | |
| Investigator's Name: | Jeffrey Petrella |
| Proposed Analysis: | Same as Dr. Zhang's proposal. Dr. Petrella will be the Principal Investigator of this project. |
| Investigator's Name: | Christopher Calixte |
| Proposed Analysis: | Duke medical student will participate in this project |
