Join us on Tuesday, January 14th at 10:00 am for the BMEII Seminar Series: "Data-driven stratification of cognitive decline in aging and dementia" by Eran Dayan, PhD, Associate Professor of Radiology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Please join in person (Hess Center, 2nd Floor, Seminar Room B) or via Zoom. 

Abstract

Data-driven methods have shown considerable promise in biomedicine and have been employed as diagnostic, prognostic, and stratification tools across a range of clinically relevant tasks. The application of such methods is particularly compelling in the context of cognitive aging, which is characterized by substantial interindividual variability. While some individuals exhibit poor and accelerated cognitive aging, others appear more resilient to normal and pathological age-associated cognitive decline. Marked variability is also observed in the progression of cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia. Understanding and constraining this variability is critical for the future success of preventive and disease-modifying interventions for AD and other forms of dementia. In my talk, I will describe recent work from my lab, where we developed methods based on complex network analysis and machine learning to predict cognitive decline rates in normal and pathological aging. I will also discuss potential mechanisms underlying susceptibility to and protection against accelerated cognitive aging. Altogether, our research demonstrates the utility of data-driven and model-driven methods in enhancing our understanding of the variation in progression rates observed in normal and pathological cognitive aging.
 

Bio

Dr. Eran Dayan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also holds faculty positions at the Biomedical Research Imaging Center and the Neuroscience Curriculum. He completed his PhD in computational neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science and then moved to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow and subsequently as a senior research fellow. At NINDS, he became interested in neuroinformatics and in the use of computational modeling approaches in clinical neuroscience research. Dr. Dayan joined UNC Chapel Hill in 2016, where he established the neuroinformatics laboratory. His research, primarily funded by NIA and NICHD, uses neuroimaging and a range of modeling approaches to capture mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability in aging and dementia and develop diagnostic and prognostic methods in these populations. Since joining UNC, Dr. Dayan has won several awards including the IBM Faculty Development Award and the Distinguished Investigator Award from The Academy for Radiology & Biomedical Imaging Research.