Joana Pereira's research group - our research

Our group works on brain connectivity variables derived from structural magnetic resonance imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging or diffusion tensor imaging in patients with Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.

Our current projects focus on the assessment of brain connectivity and network topology in different stages of these disorders and their relation to clinical measures.

We are also working on analyses of spatial patterns derived from amyloid and tau positron emission tomography as well as biomarkers derived from cerebrospinal fluid and blood.

Our ultimate goal is to develop novel brain connectivity variables and graph theory methods to improve early diagnosis, assessment of disease progression and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

Research projects

Multilayer brain connectivity

In this project, we are integrating the information from different neuroimaging modalities (DTI, fMRI, PET, T1-w) into a single brain connectome in order to assess the interaction between different pathological processes occurring in aging and neurodegnerative diseases.c

Dynamic brain connectivity

In this project, we have developed new methods to assess dynamic changes in brain connectivity based on introducing delays in correlations in the functional activation signals between brain areas. These methods have proven to be more sensitive to changes occuring in the networks oaf patients with Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease compared to other dynamic connectivity measures.

Application of deep learning to brain connectivity measures

In this project, we are working with different types of neural network architectures to predict Alzheimer's disease and other disorders from DTI and fMRI connectivity measures and toplogical properties.

Software development

Together with Prof. Giovanni Volpe (Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg) we have developed an open-access software for the analysis of brain connectivity: BRAPH (Brain Analysis with Graph Theory), which can be downloaded at: http://braph.org/ .