Grant: Project Grant

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a severe neurodegenerative disorder estimated to result worldwide in 5.8 million disability-adjusted life years [1], with an economic burden of more than $1.2 billion in Canada alone (Parkinson Canada, 2020). Recently, PD research is going through a paradigm shift towards defining objective biological staging criteria to complement or replace symptom driven detection and progression tracking. This new framework provides a new opportunity for discovery of non-invasive biomarkers for prediction of disease progression. We propose to leverage this staging framework to characterize the regions of the brain that characterize PD patients who are at different stages of the disease. We assess the utility of these brain signatures as biomarkers by their prognostic ability to predict future patient stages across multiple longitudinal datasets. To this aim, we will develop a distributed data management and processing framework, then use this infrastructure to characterize specifically brain network level signatures to study and predict disease progression in longitudinal data, and make our methods and results open for other to reuse, as well as provide training for groups who need these tools for in their clinical research environment.