10096232Portable brain imaging: a biomarker platform for dementiaClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKThis project aims to make one of the most promising platforms for biomarkers of developing dementia widely accessible by making it affordable to services and acceptable to patients. A biomarker is a measure of a bodily function that can be used to make useful predictions about the body. The biomarker we are interested in is the **activity in brain networks**. We can "see" brain activity by measuring how much blood is going to an area. There are constant changes in activity happening across several areas of the brain at the same time. **In dementia, we see this healthy pattern shift to dementia patterns**. Such changes have been shown to predict the onset of dementia and get worse as dementia progresses, making it a **useful measurement when trying new drugs or treatments** to delay or slow down dementia progression. Measuring the activity of the brain has traditionally been done using a special type of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a medical scan that requires the patient to lie still for about 20 minutes in a tight, noisy, uncomfortable space - If the patient moves, the scan will be wasted. This is very difficult for patients with dementia. The scanners are also very expensive to buy and run, costing more than £1 million and requiring university graduate operators. These scans can harm patients with pacemakers. This means these scans have not been widely accessible. To make them more accessible, we will take another technology that can see brain activity called near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). It uses harmless infrared light, and can be done at home wearing a special headcap costing about £10,000, and operators can be trained much quicker than on MRI. We are already building a scanner that will have many features that are important for dementia, such as very high spatial resolution and it will be built to the standards to make it a medical device. But NIRS scanners need a good fit with the head, and a good fit can be uncomfortable or finicky to set up, squandering the comfort advantage NIRS could have over MRI. As we are still designing it, we can use this opportunity to speak to those who live with dementia, their carers and the professionals helping them to learn their needs to ensure it works reliably, comfortably and efficiently, and work together to build the headgear so it is dementia-suitable out of the box.