From Alzheimer’s to AI: how the TReNDS center at Georgia State is advancing brain research

(Press-News.org) ATLANTA — The TReNDS Center at Georgia State University has hit a new stride, earning dual NIH R01 grants aimed at tackling Alzheimer’s disease progression and advancing multimodal brain imaging techniques in neuropsychiatric disorders. The awards mark an exceptional year of achievement for the center and its director, Vince Calhoun, who was recently featured in a global special issue on the “State of the Brain” in the journal Aperture Neuro.

R01 grants by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deliver key federal funding to advance independent studies. The competitive awards are a notable benchmark of scientific excellence. Calhoun is the founding director of the tri-institutional Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDS) and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics.

"Under Dr. Calhoun’s leadership, the TReNDS Center has set the standard for excellence in brain mapping and neuroscience research,” said Donald Hamelberg, Georgia State’s vice president for Research and Economic Development. “This innovative work is earning well-deserved recognition from the federal government and advancing our understanding of the human brain.”

The center’s two new NIH-funded R01 research projects are focused on advancing methods to integrate and analyze complex brain imaging and genomic data. The projects aim to push the boundaries of multimodal data fusion to improve our understanding, diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

One, a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, will support research to develop flexible, multidimensional models that link data to uncover complex patterns in neuroimaging and genomics to improve understanding and prediction of Alzheimer’s and related disease.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Jean Liu is a co-principal investigator on the grant. She says this research has the potential to be transformative for understanding how diseases develop and change over time by combining information about what people do, their genes and how they behave.

“Even though we have clearly learned a lot during recent years about Alzheimer’s disease, about Tau and amyloid plaques in the brain and characteristics of cognitive decline, it is still challenging to precisely identify and predict the progress of the disease from very early stages,” Liu said. “We expect that our approach will be able to classify with high accuracy the various types of dementias, be able to predict the temporal dynamics of individual cognitive ability and shed insight on the causal mechanisms of diseases. We will share the tools with research communities in a ready-to-use toolkit. We anticipate that these tools will substantially accelerate research progress in Alzheimer’s disease and other psychiatric disorders.”

The second project, a four-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), supports the development of AI-based source-separation methods to identify multimodal brain imaging biomarkers which will facilitate biology-based dimensional classification of psychiatric patients.

“With this grant funding, we’re extending our existing data-driven framework, advancing technologies that leverage multimodal data to improve our ability to predict Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and identify unique signatures of AD and related dementias,” Calhoun said. “Our focus is on developing new algorithms that expand our ability to visualize both where and when brain disorders are impacting brain volume, brain function and brain wiring, and also mapping how these are linked to genomic factors. By developing improved approaches to understand complex brain data, we are setting the stage for untangling the complexity of brain disorders and improving prediction, which will lead to our ability to help more patients and families.”

In a new contribution to the Aperture Neuro “State of the Brain” report, Calhoun outlined a number of forthcoming trends in the future of brain mapping based on his research.

The special issue showcases contemporary perspectives in human brain mapping, featuring editorials and reflections from keynote speakers, award recipients and leaders at the last Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) Annual Meeting.

In the article, Calhoun emphasizes staying “close to the data” by preserving the brain’s complex, high-dimensional patterns rather than simplifying too early. He introduces a new framework for classifying brain analysis methods, promotes hybrid models like NeuroMark — an automated and adaptive pipeline to identify reproducible fMRI markers of brain disorders — and highlights the value of expressive visualizations and time-varying connectivity modeling.

At the 2024 OHBM meeting, Calhoun was awarded the prestigious Glass Brain Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors exceptional contributions in the field of human brain mapping.

This spring the TReNDS Center, along with other leaders at Georgia Tech and Emory University, will host a Functional Neuroimaging Symposium to bring together leading neuroscientists and brain researchers. The event will feature recent breakthroughs in functional brain imaging as well as panel discussions focused on various aspect of the future of neuroimaging.

To learn more about the TReNDS Center, visit https://trendscenter.org/.

For more information about Georgia State Research, visit research.gsu.edu.

END