COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH AT UC DAVIS
Medicine and Machine Learning
Drs. Chen-Nee Chuah, UC Davis College of Engineering and Brittany Dugger, UC Davis School of Medicine work together to enhance neuropathology and decode dementia.
Drs. Chuah and Dugger share a passion for eliminating dementia through innovative and interdisciplinary research. Their collaboration began in 2019, inspired by their personal experiences of dementia's impact on their loved ones.
With initial funding from the UC Noyce Initiative, Chuah and Dugger developed a deep-learning framework that uses semi-supervised learning to quantify neurodegenerative diseases across different brain regions. Their approach leverages abundant unlabeled brain images to augment the number of labeled datasets. Their model demonstrated remarkable precision, signaling a breakthrough with improved efficiency in the review of whole slide images of brain tissue.
Building on this work, they collaborated on the UC Davis segment of the Brain Digital Slide Archive (BDSA). Funded by the Nat'l Institutes of Health and convening over 10 research centers, BDSA is focused on harmonizing data for brain tissue slides across participating universities to establish common labels and ease data analysis.
AI for Next-Gen Neuropathology
Donated brain tissue fuels progress in neuropathology and its critical role in dementia research.
Neuropathologic evaluation of brain tissue is central to diagnosis and staging of all dementias, including Alzheimer's, Lewy body, vascular and frontotemporal types.
Today, whole slide imaging systems simplify distribution of histologic data and enable image analysis algorithms to be developed and applied to aid in assessing brain image slides.
At the same time, machine learning (ML) is automating and accelerating image analysis and manual tracing tasks that are laborious and time-consuming. ML is also used to automatically detect pathologies when images are well-defined for more efficient screening, while complex or ambiguous cases with overlapping pathologies are evaluated by human experts.
AggieBrain integrates ML-based tools with large, well-curated data sets to transform neuropathology research, optimizing workflows and fulfilling the promise of personalized medicine.
With research leading the way, we will overcome dementia one day.
Chuck Berghoff, Susan & Charles Berghoff Foundation
MORE THAN EVER, RESEARCHERS NEED YOUR SUPPORT
SUPPORT THE AGGIEBRAIN INITIATIVE
The Susan and Charles Berghoff Foundation has a long-standing commitment to focused dementia research, exemplified by our support of the AggieBrain Initiative at UC Davis. Uncovering the root causes of dementia is vital in the search to cure this devastating condition in all of its forms.