Testing theoretical models of age and disease related changes to inform prevention. Pathological brain changes associated with future cognitive decline become detectable in the 40s or earlier. Yet little is known about what constitutes normal brain ageing in mid-life. Using a number of neuroimaging and epidemiological techniques this project will scrutinise brain and cognitive ageing in middle-age and their significance.
Plasma protein profiles in normal brain ageing and early stages of dementia. Brain changes related to ageing and dementia are associated with altered proteins that can be detected in the blood. This project will examine blood samples from a number of well-characterised ageing cohorts to discover proteins that may serve as potential markers of brain ageing and the early stages of dementia.
Efficient learning from multiple brain imaging data sets. Brain imaging data analysis methods have proven to be very effective in the study of brain functions and the identification of brain disorders because they minimise the modelling assumptions on the underlying structure of the problem. Analysis of multiple brain imaging data sets, either of the same modality as in multitask or multisubject data sets or from different modalities as in the case of data fusion, is a challenging problem in bi ....Efficient learning from multiple brain imaging data sets. Brain imaging data analysis methods have proven to be very effective in the study of brain functions and the identification of brain disorders because they minimise the modelling assumptions on the underlying structure of the problem. Analysis of multiple brain imaging data sets, either of the same modality as in multitask or multisubject data sets or from different modalities as in the case of data fusion, is a challenging problem in biomedical image analysis. This project will lead to fundamental contributions as well as techniques that address both problems: extraction of relevant features information from multisubject brain imaging data sets of the same modality or from fusion of brain imaging data sets collected from multimodalities.Read moreRead less