Grant: Alliance Grants

Medical imaging technologies play a crucial role in early diagnosis and management of a variety of diseases, as well as in clinical research and drug development. Continued developments of medical imaging systems have vastly improved our ability to visualize body tissues and processes, enabling more accurate detection of medical conditions. However, recent trends for personalized medicine call for new approaches in precision diagnostics with organ-specific imaging tools customized for particular organs or diseases. Dual-modality imaging is an integral part of this approach as it offers complimentary visual and quantitative information that is based on aligned morphological and functional data and therefore provides the highest efficacy and diagnostic capability. One of the biggest areas of impact is Alzheimer's Disease (AD) where precision imaging is required for accurate identification of a combination of specific AD biomarkers. This holds a promise to predict the future development of dementia in patients at risk and to enable the diagnosis of Alzheimer's pathology at the early stages when available treatments are maximally effective. It is also of a high importance to stratify cohort of patients 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-dedicated Positron Emission Tomography (PET) with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for precision biomarker-guided medicine in AD. The proposed PET/MRI system will have some unique advantages to improve early and differential diagnosis of AD through combining the metabolic and molecular information from PET and structural, functional information from MRI. The commercialization and clinical use of the proposed PET/MRI technology will overcome "one-size-fits-all" approach for AD detection, intervention and prevention, and will advance the field of AD management beyond the current standard of care in Canada, and globally.