Molecular neuroimaging

Neurodegeneration is the process leading to neuronal death in diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Halting or preventing neurodegeneration would help patients afflicted with these diseases.

We use neuroimaging tools and brain samples to study the process of neurodegeneration in people with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases with the following goals:

Being able to quantify "in vivo"  the structural and molecular changes occurring in the process of neurodegeneration in humans and experimental animals.

Identifying structural or molecular neuroimaging markers that could be used as surrogate endpoints in therapeutic trials.

Neuroimaging markers would permit to study therapeutic effectiveness in the preclinical stages and with much smaller samples than using neuropsychological endpoints.

Identifying patterns of motor behaviour that could more reliably be used to monitor disease progression in Parkinson’s disease.

Projects:

Flumazenil PET to separate Alzheimer's from vascular dementia.

Study of the localization in the human brain of the white matter pathways underlying memory mechanisms.

Organization of a Brain Bank of patients with a well-studied clinical phenotype, including quantification of cognitive and motor functions.

Pattern of amyloid deposition in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia measured with PIB.

Serotonin 1A receptor loss as an early marker of neuronal loss in Alzheimer's disease.

Inflammation as an early marker of disease activity in Alzheimer's disease.

Receptor loss in the entorhinal cortex of patients with mild cognitive impairment.

Lateral displacement as a marker of a predisposition to postural impairment in Parkinson’s disease.