Imaging Markers of Vascular Brain Health: Quantification, Clinical Implications, and Future Directions.

Cerebrovascular disease (CVD) manifests through a broad spectrum of mechanisms that negatively impact brain and cognitive health. Yet CVD changes (excluding acute stroke) are insufficiently considered in aging and dementia studies which can lead to an incomplete picture of the etiologies contributing to the burden of cognitive impairment. In this context, the aims of this conference are:
1. To provide a research update on the current MRI methods that can measure CVD lesions as well as early CVD-related brain injury specifically related to small vessel disease

2. To discuss the clinical implications and relevance of these CVD imaging markers for cognitive decline, incident dementia, and disease progression in Alzheimer disease, and Alzheimer-related dementias

3. To present our perspective on the outlook and challenges that remain in the field.

With the increased research interest in this area, we believe that reliable CVD imaging biomarkers for aging and dementia studies are on the horizon.

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Prof Marco Duering
Medical Image Analysis Center (MIAC AG)
Department of Biomedical Engineering,
University of Basel, Switzerland

Marco Duering is a MD with diverse training backgrounds, ranging from molecular and cellular biology during his doctoral thesis at the Center for Molecular Biology Heidelberg (ZMBH) to bioinformatics and clinical neurology. His clinical neuroscience research uses neuroimaging as the main tool for investigating the connection between vascular brain diseases and cognitive impairment.