Computer Vision News - March 2023

17 Duygu Tosun-Turgut a whole system approach, a multi-domain approach to understand the disease as well as to treat the disease at the same time. It's happening, and one of the key steps to get there is really bringing data from multiple sources, from multiple cohorts, where we see diversity. Not just in terms of race and ethnicity but also in lifestyle diversity or genetic diversity. That truly gives us a more complete picture of the disease. We really need that collaboration and big data science approaches. and AI are progressing at a really fast-pace. All these new techniques take advantage of bigger data sets. What I would hope to see when I'm closer to retirement is a better understanding of the disease. Even right now, when we define Alzheimer’s, we define it based on amyloid and tau pathologies. There are all these other earlier changes happening in the brain as well as in the entire body, particularly focusing on neuroinflammation or peripheral inflammation, or microglial activation, again related to inflammation. We are still learning a lot about what contributes to Alzheimer's disease. One of the interesting things or one of the avenues we still just started exploring, is how the rest of the body is actually affecting the brain. It's not in isolation: everything you do for the health of your body actually affects the brain. That includes nutrition. That includes exercise or lifestyle or how your body develops at younger ages, or chronic diseases like diabetes or hypertension. All of those have an impact on the brain, how your brain is functioning, and also how the brain reacts to these insults of protein pathology. We are just learning about that. I think that over the years, we will have a bigger understanding of these multi- system interactions. It's not going to be an isolated look at what an amyloid pathology is doing to the brain, or what tau pathology is doing to the brain and try to fix that one at a time. It's going to be a full picture and