Jens H Jensen
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease (AD) still has no effective treatment. One reason is a shortage of tools that can detect brain damage early, when treatment is most likely to help.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Biophysics
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
diffusion MRI
dMRI
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Determine whether diffusional kurtosis imaging (DKI), an MRI method that measures water movement in tissue, can track brain microstructure changes in 3xTg-AD mice treated with the drug P021 from 2 to 18 months of age.
- Evaluate double-pulsed DKI, a new extension of diffusion MRI, as a tool for monitoring how Alzheimer's-like pathology in mice responds to treatment.
- Test whether resting-state functional MRI, which measures coordinated activity between brain regions, detects how 3xTg-AD mice respond to P021 treatment.
- Correlate DKI and resting-state fMRI measures with biochemical, morphological and behavioral data from the same mice to uncover the biology behind the imaging changes.
More about the research
Standard scans such as PET and anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) show limited detail. They miss two things AD is known to change: the fine structure of brain tissue, called microstructure, and how brain regions communicate. This project tests whether two advanced MRI methods can sense those changes and track whether a drug is working.
Why it matters
Drug trials for Alzheimer's disease need sensitive ways to tell whether a treatment is slowing damage, especially at early stages. If diffusional kurtosis imaging and resting-state fMRI can track drug response in mice, these noninvasive scans could be used in human Alzheimer's trials. They could also help researchers study what causes the disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Guoshi Li
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Neuroscience
Predict which brain regions have disrupted excitation-inhibition balance in 3xTg-AD Alzheimer's model mice versus normal mice, by applying the Multiscale Neural Model Inversion (MNMI) framework to ZTE resting-state fMRI and diffusion MRI.
Itamar Kahn
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Chart how brain network organization, especially system segregation, changes across the mouse lifespan by repeatedly scanning the same awake mice with resting-state fMRI from 3 to 21 months of age.
Ai-Ling Lin
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Neuroscience
Identify how the severity of gut dysbiosis tracks over time with regional amyloid, tau and neurodegeneration markers and cognition in Alzheimer's patients and healthy controls, using PET, 7 Tesla MRI, gut microbiome sequencing and cognitive testing.
The school
Medical University of South Carolina: 19 labs on PI Pages, $321M a year on research, 271 research doctorates a year.
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