Worldwide Consortium of Retinal Imaging for Alzheimer's Disease (BRAINSTORM)

The innovative goal of the BRAINSTORM project is to guide clinical management of Alzheimer's disease (AD) by detecting the disease in the pre-symptomatic phase in a non-invasive, rapid and cost-effective manner. The consortium consists of leading clinicians and scientists with diverse expertise, all with the aim of evaluating multimodal, retinal biomarkers in AD. They achieve this by evaluating a) retinal, hyperspectral, photographic, OCT and OCT angiography biomarkers of AD against neurological imaging, blood, CSF & neuropsychological biomarkers in adults at increased risk for AD (b) determine the specificity of these retinal biomarkers by cognitive , image healthy people with common age-related eye diseases, (c) identify biomarkers for retinal imaging of cerebrovascular disease, and (d) establish pathological correlates of the retinal biomarkers in AD in preclinical models and post-mortem human tissues.
The project leverages established cohorts of highly phenotyped participants with increased risk of AD and leverages unique expertise in retinal
imaging, artificial intelligence, neuropathology and preclinical disease modeling.
Specificity, sensitivity studies and molecular correlates of the retinal imaging biomarkers studied in this project are essential for rational clinical use. The impact of identifying the most relevant, retinal biomarkers in pre-symptomatic AD is of great importance because it will facilitate the recruitment of clinical trials and the identification of persons at risk and open the door to personalized medicine.