# Cerebral Blood Flow trajectory in the Alzheimer's Disease continuum

> **NIH NIH R03** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 2020 · $162,000

## Abstract

Summary:
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive dementia and affecting
almost 10 percent of Americans of 65 years or older. The pathological basis of the disease is believed to
involve deposition of cerebral amyloid, which can be detected with CSF sampling or PET scanning. However
AD progression rates are highly variable and amyloid positivity alone accounts for a moderate increase to the
risk of developing AD in the lifetime. Cerebral blood flow (CBF) is a measure of cerebrovascular integrity and is
also tightly coupled to regional cerebral metabolism, thus providing a biomarker for functional
neurodegeneration. Reductions in regional CBF corresponding to clinical deterioration in prodromal and fully
developed AD have previously been reported in cross-sectional studies. However its trajectory from cognitively
normal condition to the diseased stage and also its interaction with amyloid deposition is incompletely
understood. Arterial Spin Labeled (ASL) perfusion MRI provides cost-effective non-invasive quantification of
CBF and can be measured in routine MRI settings, but suffers from low signal to noise ratio necessitating use
of advanced signal processing technique to assess physiological changes. In this proposal, we will
characterize longitudinal changes in regional CBF in AD patients using data obtained from Alzheimer's disease
neuroimaging initiative (ADNI) and assess the predictive value of regional CBF as an early stage AD
biomarker. Our focus will be to identify the brain regions showing the earliest and most consistent changes in
CBF in AD subjects. The project will involve developing customized image processing pipeline for processing
ASL MRI data from the third and fourth stages of ADNI (ADNI2 and ADNI3), which will include data cleaning
and developing automated data quality evaluation metric. ADNI3 data has been acquired using multiple ASL
acquisition methods in different scanning platforms, and we will perform a systematic study of its effect on
resulting CBF maps. Further, data will be homogenized across different ASL acquisition methods and scanning
platforms to facilitate joint analysis of data across scanning platforms. Finally, we will also compare regional
CBF and regional structural volumetry to test the hypothesis that they provide complementary information for
disease status and progression as well as to assess their combined ability towards the same.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9903185
- **Project number:** 5R03AG063213-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Sudipto Dolui
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $162,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-04-01 → 2022-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9903185

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9903185, Cerebral Blood Flow trajectory in the Alzheimer's Disease continuum (5R03AG063213-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9903185. Licensed CC0.

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