Alzheimer's Disease

Statistics professor aims to use fMRI data to identify, predict Alzheimer’s

Teresa Donnellan — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:58:51 +0000

Statistics professor aims to use fMRI data to identify, predict Alzheimer’s Teresa Donnellan Fri, 06/21/2024 - 10:58

In the quest to combat Alzheimer's disease, ��AV professor Abolfazl Safikhani is working with neuroscientists and imaging experts at the University of Washington's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) to pioneer groundbreaking advancements in biomarker identification.

Abolfazl Safikhani. Photo by Creative Services

"We're trying to understand and come up with the biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease using imaging data,” said Safikhani, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics. “[We will] try to distinguish and classify between people who have Alzheimer’s disease or will be developing it in the near future compared to healthy individuals."

At the core of the ADRC project lies functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, which researchers are using to identify biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease. Unlike conventional imaging techniques, fMRI provides researchers with a comprehensive view of brain activity, enabling them to discern subtle connectome-based changes associated with the disease.

Collecting and analyzing fMRI data comes with challenges, as imaging available for research is limited. Nevertheless, the researchers remain undeterred in their quest to unlock the secrets of Alzheimer's disease. They have already made early progress.

"We were able to get some really good preliminary results, from which a [National Institutes of Health] proposal has been submitted and is currently under review," said Safikhani. He added, "If we could come up with a combination of statistical and machine learning techniques to detect Alzheimer’s progression, it would be one of the most interesting projects I have ever worked on.”

By combining expertise from diverse disciplines and leveraging the power of interdisciplinary collaboration, this project promises to make an important step toward early detection and intervention strategies for Alzheimer's disease.

In This Story

Abolfazl Safikhani

Delve into Statistics at George Mason

Topics

Department of Statistics

College of Engineering and Computing

Strategic Direction

Mason research on supportive decision making could help people living with dementia

Colleen Rich — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 17:24:59 +0000

Mason research on supportive decision making could help people living with dementia Colleen Rich Fri, 07/21/2023 - 13:24

Guardianship has long been the traditional way to support decision-making for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, but recent research conducted by ��AV philosophy professor Andrew Peterson investigates an alternative that allows for more autonomy and a greater sense of dignity.

Andrew Peterson. Photo provided

The approach is called supported decision making, and Peterson and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have received a $3.1 million grant funded by the National Institute on Aging to investigate how it can improve health outcomes for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. The research is being conducted at the Penn Memory Center, an internationally recognized facility for diagnosis and care for persons living with dementia, where Peterson is an affiliate researcher.

“Dementia is a disease that robs people of their autonomy,” said Peterson, an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. “A serious challenge for people in the early stages of disease is that they usually have mild impairments in only one aspect of decision making. This doesn’t mean that they can’t make decisions, as guardianship would suggest. Rather they just need support from trusted others: if they can’t remember facts from a doctor’s appointment, a care partner can attend and take notes; if they have difficulty deliberating between choices, a care partner can talk them over during morning coffee.”

In a New York Times opinion piece about Britney Spears’ high-profile court-appointed guardianship, Peterson and his fellow researchers wrote that the difference between guardianship and supported decision-making is analogous to the difference between a dictatorship and self-rule. “Unlike guardianship, which creates an all-powerful guardian and strips the subject of the right to make decisions, in supported decision-making, the individual retains final control over key decisions,” they said.

Supported decision making was originally developed for persons living with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but Peterson said the framework holds great promise for people with neurodegenerative disease. The advantage of supported decision making, Peterson said, is its familiarity.

“We often, if not always, make decisions with the advice and support of trusted others, such as friends, family, mentors, and work colleagues,” he said. “This makes our decisions better, even for people with no cognitive problems. Supported decision making formalizes this process so expectations and roles are explicit, and persons living with dementia can maintain their independence for as long as possible.”

Peterson and his colleagues will develop best practices for supported decision making in memory care facilities. Although supported decision making is rapidly gaining traction in the law, there is a paucity of data about the benefits of this approach. Does supported decision making resolve decision making conflict? Do persons living with dementia show improvements in quality of life when using supported decision making? And what role should geriatricians play in facilitating this decision-making process? Peterson and his colleagues aim to answer these questions.

The research team is taking a phased approach. First, they will develop a supported decision-making toolkit. To do this, Peterson and his colleagues are interviewing patients and their care partners, memory care physicians, and law and bioethics experts. From these interviews and consensus process, they will develop a list of needs and plausible best practices for supporting decision making.

In the second phase of the study, the team will conduct a clinical trial, in which some patients and care partners will be encouraged to use supported decision making while others are not. They will compare these groups with outcome measures related to quality of life, life satisfaction, sense of dignity and agency, and decision-making conflict.

By the end of the study, Peterson said they aim to have a supported decision-making guide that can be scaled to other memory centers nationwide, as well as an evidence base that can justify changes to guardianship law.

Topics

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Research

Alzheimer's Disease

George Mason Faculty Support Aspiring High School Scientist

mthomp7 — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 18:16:41 +0000

George Mason Faculty Support Aspiring High School Scientist mthomp7 Wed, 04/14/2021 - 14:16

In This Story

Zoran Duric

Ron Nachum, Student at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Helps Fight Alzheimer’s Disease with Support from Mason Faculty.

As teachers and mentors, ��AV faculty help nurture some of the brightest scientific minds. In addition to mentoring college students, Mason faculty have consistently and persistently offered their expertise and academic support to our local K-12 schools and their students with tours, summer internships, presentations and mentorship.

This year, during the pandemic, faculty have designed and implemented virtual approaches to many of these historical commitments. One such is the effort to support a very gifted junior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Ron Nachum. As a sophomore, Nachum first contacted Zoran Duric, associate professor in the Computer Science (CS) Department, Volgenau School seeking an introduction into research and a faculty mentor to supervise his project for the annual Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Science and Engineering Fair. Duric connected with CS PhD candidate, Kyle Jackson and long time collaborator Professor Lynn Gerber in the College of Health and Human Services (CHHS) to form Nachum’s transdisciplinary mentorship team.

Following the successful submission and presentation of an abstract at IEEE’s Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference in July, 2020, Nachum wanted to expand on his growing experience working with the mentorship team to take on new challenges. After losing his grandfather to a difficult battle with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), Nachum set out to work on a project close to his heart, with the goal of developing an accessible system for assessment of neurodegenerative diseases (NDs). His idea was to apply computer vision to identify changes and deterioration in fine motor movements seen in neurodegenerative diseases (such as Parkinson’s Disease and AD). After a literature review and Zoom sessions with the mentorship team, the framework for ‘PANDwriting’ was outlined: a system which requires just one smartphone camera for kinematic analysis of handwriting movements with computer vision, from which collected data would be used for classification with machine learning.

This solution was shown to be accurate, quantitative, easily administered, and inexpensive (requiring just a phone or camera). If shown to be valid in further clinical testing, PANDwriting could provide a very useful tool to identify abnormalities in fine motor movements in an accessible manner, serving both as an early warning system for disease onset and as a widely-available diagnostic tool. With the existing diagnostic process for NDs being expensive, long, and complex – around 50% of patients with NDs are not diagnosed in their lifetime – this accessible system could reduce delays in the treatment process and reliance on costly MRI imaging, improving treatment outcomes. Recently, in presenting his work, “PANDwriting: An Accessible Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Novel Diagnostic Framework Using Vision-Based Handwriting Kinematic Analysis and Machine Learning”, Nachum won first place in Translational Medical Sciences (TMED) category at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Science and Engineering Fair. He then went on to win the grand prize at the Fairfax County Science and Engineering Fair, which qualified him for the Virginia State Science and Engineering Fair on April 10 where he earned an impressive second place. Nachum will now go on to compete in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May.

Another example of how Mason’s faculty expertise helps nurture local talent and develop the next generation of scientists.