The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer's disease (AD). Other causes include Vascular Cognitive Impairment (VCI), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The overall goal of TAP-dementia project is to improve diagnostics of these dementias.
By improve diagnosis, we mean making it Timely, Accurate, and Personalized (TAP). TAP dementia improves diagnostics by (i) developing, (ii) validating, and (iii) implementing diagnostic tests. This allows appropriate care to be provided, which contributes to the quality of life of the person with dementia.
About your roleIn this project, you will work together with clinical and technical experts to develop technologies that can improve dementia diagnosis. For this project we are looking for a person who gets excited about large scale, complex data analyses, involving fluid biomarkers, clinical information, and neuroimaging data. Specifically, you will be responsible for:
- Finding the optimal combination of existing blood-based biomarkers to differentiate frontotemporal dementia from other types of dementias.
- Developing a novel explainable AI that combines neuroimaging and clinical data. You will be responsible for studying how this technique can be used in our large Amsterdam dementia cohort (N>7000), and in other cohorts from our national and international collaborations.
- Using multi-modal biomarkers to detect dementia caused by multiple pathologies.
As a researcher, you will strengthen the fluid biomarker and AI team in the Amsterdam Alzheimer Center. Together with other PhD students in the TAP-Dementia consortium, you ensure that the etiology of dementia can be determined in a timely and accurate manner in the future.