Sanjori Mukherjee – McNichols Family Foundation Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD candidate, Biomedical Engineering
The George Washington University

Research:
The clinical presentation of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) varies widely across individuals and the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this heterogeneity are largely unknown. Our research goal is to develop image analysis and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain to improve the understanding of AD pathology. The underlying features of images are examined further to understand whether they represent risk factors of AD or the disease itself.

How Will Your Research Benefit Society?
Alzheimer’s disease affects approximately 11% of the population in the United States. Its prevalence has increased over the years and there are concerns that it will continue to increase as people continue to live longer. The proposed work aims to identify imaging features of Alzheimer’s to aid in early detection. Additionally, identifying biomarkers of AD could help identify potential drug targets for treatment.

How will an ARCS Award Benefit Your Research?
The ARCS award will allow me to purchase the neuroimaging software applications Amira 3D Visualization and Analysis by Thermofisher and/or Analyze 14.0 by the Biomedical Imaging Resource at the Mayo Clinic. These applications will help me to extract various medical imaging features from three dimensional MRI with high precision and reliability. 3D image analysis, particularly in medical imaging, contains more detail and information than 2D images. Open source software and packages provide only limited tools for analysis of the more complicated 3D images. Those medical image analysis packages will allow me to more rapidly pursue my research on feature analysis for detecting biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease.

Career objectives:
Beyond graduate study, I want to expand my research on medical imaging to other neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis. Medical imaging is a minimally invasive way to analyze changes which is especially important when dealing with the central nervous system. After my PhD program, I would like to pursue a post-doctoral fellowship and work towards becoming the principal investigator of a neuroimaging analysis laboratory.