South Texas Alzheimer's Disease Center Imaging Core

The Imaging Core (IC) highlights the strengths of the South Texas Alzheimer Center (STAC), which has a critical mass of infrastructure, imaging expertise, and training programs.

It is comprised of the Research Imaging Institute (RII), the Department of Radiology and the Radiological Sciences Graduate Program (RSGP).

The RII is a research unit that has supported biomedical research in South Texas for 30-years, including numerous international collaborations. PI Fox has >100 publications/ multiple grants with Genetics and Multiomics core PI, Blangero at UTRGV.

The RII is housed in the same building as the Clinical Core (CC) and Population Neuroscience Core at UTHSA and includes: magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy (MR/MRSI) for humans (3-T) and animals (7-T, 12-T); positron-emission tomography (PET) for humans and animals; two medical cyclotrons for PET-isotope production; and, radio-pharmaceutical production facilities, including an FDA-approved (ANDA & IND) cGMP commercial-production facility.

Ancillary capabilities include in-scanner performance-control systems (stimulus delivery and response recording); image-guided, robotic transcranial magnetic stimulation (irTMS).

RII faculty provide expertise in image acquisition (including radiochemistry and pulse-sequence editing), image preprocessing, and sophisticated analysis, including machine learning, AI.

Image archiving, analysis and sharing (XNAT) capabilities are provided by virtual computers, a new on-site high-performance compute cluster (GENIE) and ready access to the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

The Department of Radiology provides neuroradiologic expertise (including a fluoroscopic suite dedicated to research LP) and 2 additional 3T MRI and a PET/CT scanner, also in the same building as the CC.

The STAC is a site for several clinical trials (AHEAD 3-45, markVCID, GOBS, TARCC) demonstrating ability to acquire high quality MRI (with DTI, CVR, fcMRI), amyloid, tau and FDG PET.

We routinely obtain ADNI-3 protocol MRI as part of clinical care and have implemented the protocol across 5 MRI scanners (3 at UTHSA and 1 each at Laredo and Harlingen CC sites).

We will obtain these MRI scans on all CC enrollees, annually, and will also obtain amyloid (PIB) and tau (T807, flutaucipir) PET to categorize enrollees using A/T/N criteria. We have recruited a neuroradiologist, radiochemist and computational analyst in the past year. We have implemented a post-mortem whole brain MRI protocol (with Neuropathology core).

IC faculty are leaders in multimodal MRI, functional MR and in applying and developing novel image analysis methods to answer questions relevant to ADRD; they are leading MRI harmonization/analyses within CHARGE, iSHARE consortia and in SPRINT-MIND.

The RSGP supports the STAC REC by overseeing 3 doctoral degree programs directed by IC core leaders: Neuroscience Imaging (P. Fox), Human Imaging (G. Clarke), and, Diagnostic Radiology (M.

Habes) and partners with an R25 Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP, PI Cavazos who also leads the STAC REC) to train MD/PhD scientists.