About Us

Our Project

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of neurodegenerative dementia, and its prevalence increases with age. The accumulation of pathological beta-amyloid protein in the brain begins approximately 20 years before the onset of AD. Therefore, anti-amyloid drug treatments aimed at clearing this accumulation in the early stages of the disease are being researched. Recently, some drugs have been approved for clinical use in the United States.

With our project, which was accepted within the scope of the "Strategic Health Technologies R&D Project Call" by the Turkish Health Institutes (TÜSEB) and started in 2023, machine learning and deep learning algorithms will be used to detect amyloid PET positivity in the brains of patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and to identify patients suitable for anti-amyloid treatment. By the end of the project, it is aimed to develop a national intelligent diagnostic model and explain the results of this model with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches.

Initially, AI models will be trained with the ADNI dataset and then an intelligent diagnostic model will be created using Turkey's first amyloid PET dataset generated at our center. The model will be retrained with Gazi datasets and tested with amyloid PET images of 30 new MCI patients to be recruited within the scope of the project. This project aims to use clinical findings, laboratory tests, and brain imaging effectively in the differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases and in the selection of patients for anti-amyloid treatments. The reliability of the obtained results will be increased with the XAI approach.

Our Project Team

Project Coordinator

Prof. Dr. Lütfiye Özlem ATAY