Featured Speaker: David Scott, Ph.D., Scientific Director
Duration: 1 hour
Description: In this webinar, we discuss how the integration of biomarkers across neuroimaging modalities can improve the characterization of PD disease state and help to predict whether a PD patient will reliably progress over the time frame of a clinical trial. Evidence of therapeutic efficacy will be most robust in those patients with reliable disease progression and the identification of such patients presents an enrichment opportunity requiring fewer study subjects to meet a primary endpoint.
We present findings from the open source Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative database, which suggests that baseline volumetric MRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) can meaningfully inform the longitudinal progression of DaTscan uptake in PD patients. Our work identified a pattern of morphometric and diffusivity features associated with progressive decline in DAT availability, suggesting that structural changes in the brain may reflect an orthogonal feature associated with an accelerated disease trajectory.