Presented by Hanna Renvall (PhD) - Assistant Professor Dept. Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Scientific Director of BioMag Laboratory, HUS.
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Abstract: "More than 10 million Europeans suffer from mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a condition intermediate between the expected cognitive decline in healthy aging brain and dementia. The progression of MCI is diverse: While many subjects remain stable, > 30% of the subjects progress to dementia within five years, especially to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The initial neurodegenerative changes in the brain occur years before structural changes can be detected with the current imaging methodologies. In AD-type neuropathology, one of the earliest risk signs is synaptic dysfunction which can cause brain network disturbances that are observable with magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) and correlate with the disease stage.
In this talk, I will review studies demonstrating that M/EEG signals of MCI subjects can predict the future conversion from MCI to AD with good accuracy in the early symptomatic phase. I will introduce the AI-Mind project (2021-2026, funded by EU Horizon 2020), in which >1000 MCI subjects in Finland, Italy, Norway, and Spain have been longitudinally addressed with M/EEG and comprehensive neuropsychological testing, combined with blood and genetic biomarkers, early along the disease trajectory. The ambitious project aims at developing tools that would be both cost-effective and reliable in pinpointing the subjects with greatest risk for neurodegeneration. Our preliminary results demonstrate that features extracted from both resting-state and task MEG data may be informative in predicting the disease stage at the individual level and correlate with biological risk factors".
Bio: Asst. prof. Hanna Renvall is an expert in applying functional neuroimaging methods, especially magnetoencephalography (MEG), for studying cognitive and sensory processes in health and disease. She has several years’ experience in clinical neurology and neurological diagnostics. Her current research focuses on applying and developing computational modelling approaches to neuroimaging data, especially in clinical populations such as traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases. She is the scientific director of Biomag Laboratory, hosted by the Helsinki University Hospital (HUS), and in 2021 she was appointed to the first joint professorship of HUS and Aalto University in the field of translational neuroimaging.