Italian ADNI - diagnosis of incipient alzheimer disease: development of adni-based imagine markers for use by the national health system.

The project will lead to:
1. Develop procedures for the collection of Alzheimer’s markers that can potentially be immediately adopted by Italian (and international) memory clinics. This will place Italy as the front runner country in the development of new strategies for the care of Alzheimer’s disease.
2. Expand knowledge on promising markers that might implement or replace 3D MR, FDG PET, and CSF in the near future. The experience on the development of SOPs for the “traditional” 3D MR, FDG PET, and CSF markers will lead to a particularly quick development of SOPs for the novel markers such as EEG, MEG and amyloid imaging.
(i) to develop SOPs and QC procedures in order to estimate the volumes of the hippocampus, amygdala and enthorinal cortex on high resolution MR images acquired using the ADNI MP-RAGE protocol. SOPs and QC will be developed to evaluate the glucose metabolism in bilateral temporoparietal regions detected on FDG PET images acquired using the NEST-DD protocol;
(ii) to better investigate the validity of markers based on power and consistency of EEG cortical sources measured at rest and based on the intra-cortical connectivity through TMS and MEG / EEG and to develop the pertinent SOPs and QC, (iii) to bet-ter investigate the validity of the b-amyloid molecular imaging using the F18-DDNP for the preclinical diagnosis of AD.