Grant: Operating Grant: Alzheimer Society Research Program - NI Grants

A diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is still heavily relying on self-reported symptoms and tests that your doctor administers to assess memory and thinking skills. Additionally, current laboratory and imaging tests are costly, invasive, time-consuming, and rarely performed prior the onset of irreversible clinical symptoms. Would retinal imaging be suitable for diagnosing AD? If so, what obtainable information from the retinal imaging would be essential to a detect early indicator of AD? Is the indicator specific enough to diagnose AD, ruling out any other retinal diseases? I will develop a novel retinal imaging system to identify AD-specific biomarkers, a measurable indicator of disease process. Unlike the other systems used in previous studies, this system would provide AD- specific retinal features at an unmatched level of resolution using a label-free, tissue preserving and volumetric retinal imaging technique. This research program provides a retinal imaging platform to identify, monitor, and investigate multiple possible biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases that is now still limited to the brain. The progress of early detection opens doors to better diagnosis and proper care to many neurodegenerative diseases.