The Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative

Abstract

With increasing life expectancy in developed countries, the incidence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its socioeconomic impact are growing. Increasing knowledge of the mechanisms of AD facilitates the development of treatment strategies aimed at slowing down or preventing neuronal death. AD treatment trials using clinical outcome measures require long observation times and large patient samples. There is increasing evidence that neuroimaging and cerebrospinal fluid and blood biomarkers may provide information that may reduce sample sizes and observation periods. The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative will help identify clinical, neuroimaging, and biomarker outcome measures that provide the highest power for measurement of longitudinal changes and for prediction of transitions.

Fig. 1

Overview of public and private institutions contributing to the ADNI.

Fig. 2

Overview of the structural organization of the ADNI.

Fig. 3

Processing of the neuroimaging data. U. Michigan, University of Michigan; BGSMC, Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center; UCB, University of California, Berkeley; UCD, University of California, Davis; UCSD, University of California, San Diego, Mayo, Mayo Clinic Rochester; CIND, Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases, San Francisco; QC, quality control; ERC, volumetric measurement of entorhinal cortex; HippoVol, semiautomated measurement of hippocampal volume; TBM, tensor-based morphometry; segmentation, voxel-based segmentation/brain parcelation; relaxometry, T1/T2 relaxometry; CTL, cortical time-lapse maps; CT, cortical thinning; 3DSMM, parametric 3-D surface mesh modeling of subcortical structures; 4DTM, 4-D tensor maps.

Fig. 4

Overview of the clinical sites participating in the ADNI.