Ganesh B. Chand, an assistant professor of radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis' Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology (MIR), received a four-year $3.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study neuropsychiatric mechanisms in Alzheimer's disease.
The causes of neuropsychiatric symptoms in patients with Alzheimer's - such as apathy, depression, aggression or anxiety - are not well understood. Such symptoms pose additional challenges for patients, their caregivers and the clinicians treating them. Chand, the principal investigator in MIR's NeuroAI Laboratory, will develop and validate new machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to analyze large-scale datasets in hopes of learning more about why some patients experience these symptoms and others do not.
By measuring biomarkers and leveraging extensive data from sources including WashU Medicine's Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Chand's study aims to systematically investigate the intricate relationships among these markers, neuropsychiatric symptoms, vascular risk factors and genetic predispositions.
