Grant: Alliance Grants

Medical imaging technologies play a crucial role in early diagnosis and management of a variety of diseases, aswell as in clinical research and drug development. Continued developments of medical imaging systems havevastly improved our ability to visualize body tissues and processes, enabling more accurate detection ofmedical conditions. However, recent trends for personalized medicine call for new approaches in precisiondiagnostics with organ-specific imaging tools customized for particular organs or diseases. Dual-modalityimaging is an integral part of this approach as it offers complimentary visual and quantitative information thatis based on aligned morphological and functional data and therefore provides the highest efficacy anddiagnostic capability.One of the biggest areas of impact is Alzheimer's Disease (AD) where precision imaging is required foraccurate identification of a combination of specific AD biomarkers. This holds a promise to predict the futuredevelopment of dementia in patients at risk and to enable the diagnosis of Alzheimer's pathology at the earlystages when available treatments are maximally effective. It is also of a high importance to stratify cohort ofpatients for clinical trials with AD modifying therapies and for clinical neuroscience research.The overarching goal of this proposal is to develop an imaging system that will combine brain-dedicatedPositron Emission Tomography (PET) with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for precisionbiomarker-guided medicine in AD. The proposed PET/MRI system will have some unique advantages toimprove early and differential diagnosis of AD through combining the metabolic and molecular informationfrom PET and structural, functional information from MRI. The commercialization and clinical use of theproposed PET/MRI technology will overcome "one-size-fits-all" approach for AD detection, intervention andprevention, and will advance the field of AD management beyond the current standard of care in Canada, andglobally.