To date, there is no effective prodromal diagnostic for Alzheimer's disease, making therapy and study of the disease progression difficult. I am developing new approaches for non-invasively imaging the patho-histological hallmarks of Alzheimer's, amyloid plaques. Currently my research focuses  near infrared (NIR) fluorescence tomography for imaging novel NIR compounds that bind plaques.

NIR Imaging of Plaques  

Recently, a NIR dye (AOI987) has emerged that effectively crosses the BBB and binds plaques. Detection in vivo, however, can be confounded by autoflourescence and background, non-bound dye. I am interested in exploiting changes in lifetime and emission spectrum that occur on binding, potentially allowing higher contrast for imaging. Currently, I am using a Monte Carlo simulation to model the detection potential given specific parameters, including plaque density, dye quantum yield, specificity, lifetime and spectral shifts, etc. I am also testing available dyes for in vivo imaging capabilities, using multiphoton microscopy, FLIM, spectral unmixing, and an in-house system that uses a picosecond-gated intensifier for wide-field lifetime measurements.