Human brain clearance imaging: the missing link in understanding and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases

Current lack of knowledge on the clearance of amyloid-beta and tau from the brain limits our understanding of Alzheimer’s Disease, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, and other dementias.

Whereas great advances have been made on brain clearance in animal models, human imaging technologies are currently lagging behind.

Therefore, longitudinal imaging studies on these dementias cannot information on brain clearance processes, severely limiting our understanding of the initiation and progression of these diseases. Here four leading European teams on imaging of brain clearance join forces. Between these groups, several promising MRI technologies for brain clearance assessment have been proposed.

In the current project, we aim to improve the individual techniques with respect to robustness and reproducibility and to study how different conditions like disease and sleep influence the different measures.

Information gained from the different approaches will be combined into a single brain clearance model focusing on CSF-dynamics.

This project will provide the opportunity to further develop our cutting-edge technologies of brain clearance imaging, and the integration of knowledge on this highly debated physiologically system of brain clearance.

At the end of this project, imaging technologies will have been proposed, optimized, validated and applied allowing the incorporation of brain clearance imaging in research studies and clinical trials on neurodegenerative diseases.