With this aim in mind, eight European organizations - including GE Healthcare of the UK and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland - have teamed up to form the PredictAD collaboration. The research project's aim: to develop new diagnostic procedures for patients with Alzheimer's disease.
Clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease using only disease symptoms is challenging, thus the PredictAD collaboration is planning to investigate a range of imaging modalities and other measurements. This will include the study of imaging biomarkers using MRI and PET (with the tracers 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose and Pittsburgh Compound B), electrical brain-activity measurements and blood-based markers.
By developing ways to combine these multisource data, the researchers hope to enable earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, as well as provide methods for differentiating between various forms of dementia and assessing disease severity. The research may also enable improved detection of disease progression and treatment efficacy monitoring.
"PredictAD will help us gain important knowledge, not only about individual biomarkers, but also about how they may combine for early detection and therapy response monitoring," said Lennart Thurfjell, GE's head of diagnostic software, medical diagnostics. "Improving our understanding of the role that different imaging and non-imaging biomarkers play during the disease process is key as we strive to develop new diagnostic solutions for Alzheimer's disease."
At a later stage in the three-year project, a selected biomarker set will be used to develop an efficient and reliable software solution that a physician can employ to assess risk, and diagnose and monitor the progress of Alzheimer's disease in real clinical conditions using various patient data. The project will then clinically evaluate the accuracy, usability and cost-effectiveness of the models and software.
"The aim of PredictAD is to develop an objective indicator to diagnose Alzheimer's disease at the earliest stage possible," explained VTT's Jyrki Lötjönen, the project's scientific coordinator. "This may be possible by combining data from various data sources of patient monitoring, such as neuropsychological tests, medical imaging, electrical brain activity measurements, and analysing protein and metabolomics levels of blood samples."
Funded by the European Union, the PredictAD consortium comprises: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, GE Healthcare, Nextim (Finland), the University of Kuopio (Finland), Imperial College London (UK), Uppsala University (Sweden), University of Milan (Italy) and Rigshospitalet (Denmark).