CCB: Chelsea Golub's Alzheimer's Disease Project Page

Project Specifics

Chelsea Golub is a student at Milken Community High School (http://www.milkenschool.org/). Her 2008-2009 student research project will be on studying Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, the project is to do some decade-by-decade analysis of normal control subjects (ICBM database) and compare these to Alzheimer’s disease patients (ADNI database) using LONI Pipeline analyses. Many of the tasks below can be accomplished remotely using a personal computer connected to the Internet and downloading some of the appropriate LONI/CCB data/tools/resources. The first half of the project is focused on acquiring appropriate background information and skills. The second part of the project is geared towards formulating and assessing various research hypotheses using brain imaging data and tools provided by LONI/CCB.

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Tasks and Expected Results

Review and record weekly progress on Project Wiki page, see below.

Period 1 (Dec 2008 – Jan 2009)

• Go over the project references (below)
• Get CCB TWiki account: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/twiki/bin/view/TWiki/TWikiRegistration
• Apply for ADNI and ICBM IDA image-data access: https://ida.loni.ucla.edu/
• Download and test-run the Pipeline environment on local machine: http://pipeline.loni.ucla.edu/
• Data is already on cranium.loni.ucla.edu (/ifs/ccb/data/AD_Data_121408)

Period 2 (Feb – Mar 2009)

• Download and try the following data viewers
  • SHIVA: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/Software/Software_Detail.jsp?software_id=12
  • BrainSuite: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/Software/Software_Detail.jsp?software_id=19
  • ShapeViewer: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/Software/Software_Detail.jsp?software_id=18
  • LONI_Viz: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/Software/Software_Detail.jsp?software_id=7
• Begin the study of Alzheimer’s disease
• Explore the different LONI/CCB Imaging data Formats
• Begin the study of different brain imaging techniques
• Begin the exploration of LONI/CCB Brain mapping techniques

Period 3 (Apr – May 2009)

• Begin constructing Pipeline workflows using existent protocols
• Formulate research hypotheses for Controls (ICBM) and Alzheimer’s (ADNI) data that can be tested using newly developed data analysis pipelines

Period 4 (Jun – Aug 2009)

• Complete the analyses and answer the initial hypotheses using quantitative arguments
• Complete and submit a self-contained research-project paper composed of: abstract, intro, methods, results, discussion, acknowledgments and references

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References

• Project Wiki Page: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/twiki/bin/view/CCB/IndividResearcherProj_ChelseaGolub
• LONI Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) Project page: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/Research/Projects/Alzheimer.shtml
• ICBM Database: https://ida.loni.ucla.edu/login.jsp?project=ICBM
• ADNI Database: https://ida.loni.ucla.edu/login.jsp?project=ADNI
• LONI Pipeline: http://pipeline.loni.ucla.edu/
• LONI Training Manual: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/Research/LONI_Handbook_web.pdf

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Weekly Reports

• TBD