ISTAART Relay Podcast – Neuroimaging PIA

Voice Over:

Hello and thank you for listening to the fourth season of the ISTAART PIA Relay Podcast brought to you by Dementia Researcher. ISTAART is a professional society and part of the Alzheimer’s Association representing scientists, physicians, and other dementia professionals active in researching and understanding the causes and potential treatments of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

In this five-part series, we’ve asked members of the ISTAART professional interest areas to take turns interviewing their colleagues and being interviewed themselves with the interviewee going on to be the next episode’s interviewer. We’re sure you’ve listened to these before, so you’ll know what to expect. We’ll be releasing one of these podcasts each day in the buildup to the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference which, this year, takes place online and in Amsterdam.

So, sit back, turn up the volume and be ready to hear about these individuals’ amazing research fields, the work of your peers and just what you can expect at this year’s conference. Thank you for listening.

Beth Eyre:

So, hi, everyone, and thanks for tuning in. I’m Beth Eyre and I’m a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield. I’m the student postdoc executive committee member of the Vascular Cognitive Disorders PIA and, today, I’m delighted to be talking with Dr. Dave Cash. Hi, Dave.

Dr Dave Cash:

Hello.

Beth Eyre:

So, welcome, very excited to have you here.

Dr Dave Cash:

Thank you very much. Great to be here.

Beth Eyre:

Thank you. So, could I start by asking you to introduce yourself and tell us with which PIA you are involved?

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah, my name’s Dave Cash, as we’ve just discussed, I’m at the UCL Dementia Research Center at the Queen Square Institute of Neurology and I’ve been involved with the neuroimaging PIA for a little over two years now. So, I started as education chair and, this year, I am vice chair and, as we flip through AAIC, I’ll become the chair of the neuroimaging PIA just after AAIC ends.

Beth Eyre:

It’s exciting to be talking with the incoming Chair.

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah. Well, I have to admit, there were many years when I would attend the neuroimaging PIA meeting and it seemed like there were so many rock stars who were leading the committee and doing all this and I’m like, “How in the world will I ever make it in there?” In fact, I put my name forth one time, and I looked at the list of competitors for the position I put myself, no chance. But the second time around, it worked, and I got voted education chair, it’s been a lot of fun the last two years, met a lot of great people and made a lot of new friends.

Beth Eyre:

It’s really cool that you’ve done a number of roles within the executive committee. Something must be good for you to stick around, right?

Dr Dave Cash:

Well, yes, but. The way that the Neuroimaging PIA Committee works is, if you go to education, you go to vice chair and then Chair and then past Chair. So, I won one election, but I don’t know if I would’ve won three more if that was the case. But I really think it’s a good idea, I know a lot of PIAs do this where they have people looped in as a progression to keep handover and continuity really good and it definitely has worked in our case. I’ve really learned a lot from the two Chairs, the past Chairs, I’ve been interacting with. Well, three.

So, Betty Tijms was the past Chair when I came in and I’ve got to work with Renaud La Joie for a couple years and that’s been a lot of fun. And Laura Wisse, who’s now at Lund University, has just been such a great help. She’s put so much really nice structure down that I just take a lot of what she does and do it again and I look like I’m doing something rather competent when it’s really a lot of it’s been down to Laura’s excellent organization and set up.

Beth Eyre:

That’s awesome. It’s really exciting to hear a little bit about the PIA but I’d like to, and I’m sure the listeners would also, let us know a little bit about yourself and your research. So, what is your research area and then how did you come into dementia research, I guess?

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah, so my research primarily centers around imaging biomarkers, mainly structural MR, diffusion weighted MRI and various forms of PET and particularly in the preclinical stage of Alzheimer’s disease where there are no obvious or apparent symptoms but there is evidence of underlying pathology and, here at UCL, we use a few studies for that. So, we work a lot with the worldwide Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network where UCL is both the site, and we also do various research and analysis with the data collected across the entire world.

John Rohrer here at UCL runs a similar study called the Genetic FTD Initiative or GENFI and that’s a similar cohort involving genetic forms of frontotemporal dementia and that has sites all across Europe and Canada. And finally, more on the sporadic, late onset form of disease, another neurologist here at UCL, John Schott, has worked closely with the National Survey on Health and Development to do the first neuroimaging study of this 1946 birth cohort. So, this is a really exciting cohort to work with, it’s all individuals born from all over Great Britain within one week of each other in March 1946. So, our standard deviations of our age demographics are remarkably low in that study, and we’ve now scanned well over 600 non-impaired participants as part of this study, we have lots of different MRI modalities and PET modalities.

And amongst those studies, what I particularly focus on is longitudinal changes, tracking longitudinal changes within a patient over time, particularly how we can use that information from these studies to think about how we can design clinical trials better, use them as endpoints in clinical trials because, if we can make clinical trials as efficient as possible, we can make decisions quicker. If the drug’s clearly not going to work, we can stop putting all that time and investment into that and all the disappointment that will lead to it. But also, when we find drugs that are successful, like we’ve had with recent therapies, maybe we can get these drugs through the approval process with the same robust statistical evidence but get them to patients sooner.

As for how I got into dementia research, actually, my first foray into it, really, I would say, was a bit of a failure. I came from the States to do a postdoc and it was far more about novel image processing methods for segmentation and analysis and it just wasn’t a good fit for my skills. Fortunately, I had two supervisors at the time who were founding a company on how to provide imaging analysis for clinical trials so they spun this company out and I moved over there and worked at that company for about five years and there’s where I really found my love for dementia research and what I wanted to do.

So, I was setting up imaging trials with AD trials in particular, understanding all the issues about what evidence was going to be needed to gain approval for a drug, the challenges with running multi-site AD trials that involved imaging and just think the incredible massive impact a successful drug was going to have. So, I realized that, yeah, this is the area I want to work in, this space. And I was really fortunate that, as part of my first postdoc and at the company, I had a lot of time to interact with Nick Fox and Sebastien Ourselin and there’s an opportunity to come back and work between the dementia research center and a group of computer scientists and medical physicists at UCL called the Center for Medical Image Computing trying to work about how we could get these really great discoveries and machine learning algorithms for imaging implemented over into clinical research.

So, that was my journey. It’s not the conventional postdoc to investigator route that tends to be the story.

Beth Eyre:

I think it’s interesting because I think a lot of people now just don’t have that conventional route in and I think it’s important for people to hear that, anyone who’s interested in your PIA or the PIA that I’m part of, you don’t have to have that straight linear direct route and there’s lots of different ways you can get into and get to the stage that you’re at. So, that’s super exciting. So, just to follow that, you sound that you’ve worked on lots of different studies. Do you have a favorite study? And if you do have a favorite, can you tell me why?

Dr Dave Cash:

Oh, my goodness, it’s like asking to pick between children. Just with children, I can pick out particular things that I like best about them. So, I was involved on the ground floor with GENFI and ’46. So, the GENFI study, I made a lot of effort really setting up both the data capture and the data collection. With the ’46 study, we use a combined PET/MR scanner which is a very interesting device, but it comes with its own logistical challenges and things like that. So, it’s been really fun figuring out how we can make the most use of that scanner and the data we’re collecting on it.

And DIAN was the first study that I came back to the DRC to work on, and I’ve been involved with that one pretty much since I began here. So, I guess you could say that’s the oldest child in the analogy. So, I would say that those three are probably my favorite studies because I work the most with those day in and day out. But yeah, there have been other studies along the way that I’ve had time, those are other people’s kids. Nice enough, just not mine.

Beth Eyre:

So, I know you’ve already mentioned some of the work that you’ve done but, in your research field, what are some of the hot topics and most exciting areas in the field at the moment?

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah, that’s a great question. And because we have so many tools to work with, we have a lot going on with imaging. I think, first off, I’d talk about, since we’re able to capture a three-dimensional image of the brain at various stages of the disease, it’s being really investigated, lots of different modalities at the same time, to understand spatial heterogeneity, vulnerability of the disease process, which brain barriers are more vulnerable than areas. And we have a lot of data-driven disease progression modeling techniques available now like the sustained model created here at UCL by Alex Young and Neil Oxtoby and what that does is it can identify separate clusters of how the disease progression looks.

So, some people may have a, to take your PIA, may have a vascular element early on in the disease, other people may have more medial temporal involvement, and this has really taken off the world to characterize heterogeneity of imaging patterns in lots of different populations and with lots of different modalities. Related to that is the ability to see these three-dimensional maps, look at how different brain regions are connected through functional connectivity or structural connectivity and see what that tells us and combining that with PET to see what that tells us about the start and the spread of pathology over time.

I personally am really excited about all the work going on around novel PET tracers, what additional information they can provide on other aspects like neuroinflammation, synaptic density but, someday hopefully, other pathologies like TDP or alpha synuclein. Sometimes structural MRI gets put off to the side, we’ve been there, done that but I think, actually, there’s a whole lot of exciting work in structural MRI hitting it both on two fronts.

So, on the one hand, we have a lot of new AI-driven methods to make imaging more accessible. So, we have these ultra-fast MRI scanning protocols that can give us a complete structural workup in about six to seven minutes rather than the conventional 30-minute protocol. And we also have these ultra-low field MRI machines being produced where we can get scanners to participants and locations all around the world, we’ve never had access to before.

But if we go the other way and we look at some of the ultra-high field 7T MRI, we’re getting really lovely high-resolution quantitative imaging that allows us to better visualize cortical layers, substructures of the regions like the hippocampus, the thalamus, the amygdala, as well as really tiny structures like the locus coeruleus which has been a place that people have been investigating a lot recently. It’s such deep data that AI and deep learning are almost like an integral part now and where I feel like those things have had real success, particularly deep learning, is making processes that took a lot of time to run where we have a load of training data that we can really speed up the whole analysis pipelines much quicker. So, I think those are like a whistle-stop tour of the various things that I’m excited about in the imaging PIA.

Beth Eyre:

So, I heard you mentioned something to do with the vascular stuff, obviously, I love vasculature. So, what do you think, at the moment, is the best imaging modality to give us a bit more insight into vascular changes happening in preclinical stages or at least later on stages in Alzheimer’s disease?

Dr Dave Cash:

One of the first things, especially from a research perspective, is being able to have more volumetric measures so that we can see better resolve things like white matter or hyperintensities, the cues, perivascular spaces, things like that. But I think arterial spin labelings have come a long way recently. [inaudible 00:14:58] looking to roll out a multi label ASL so that we can actually get information about transit times and the flow there. I think, also, there’s been a fair amount of people looking at repurposing the early part of a fully dynamic PET scan. In some cases, like some of the amyloid tracers, you can get some really nice information about blood flow and blood perfusion from those things.

And I think the other thing that I’ve really been interested in looking at is some of the 4D flow techniques that are coming out of Wisconsin and other places where we can get a bit more information about the blood flow itself rather than this secondary proxy information. So, with some of these things, they have a lot of promise but, when we’re talking about preclinical and the signal being so small, I’d probably err on the caution of something that may not pick up the earliest signs of things but also would have maybe less variability, intra person variability that makes you wonder, okay, am I really seeing this or is this just some unique signal.

But that’s also with me with my longitudinal hat on where I’m always thinking about, with cross-sectional, it’s easier to see a big signal even with that variability. But with longitudinal, we’re talking about really small but sensitive changes in some of these measures and, as a result, I’m really worried about how much measurement from time point to time point are there so that we can pick up those changes reliably.

Beth Eyre:

I think talking about that variability, I remember, when I started collecting data, and I was so surprised how variable the data was from person to person and I don’t know why I didn’t expect that, but I found that really surprising, the differences in responses. And I think that variability is actually really interesting sometimes to look at the data because sometimes we average, don’t we, and we like to get rid of that variability but actually that’s … I think with neurodegenerative diseases, that variability could be really, really important to explain things and help us understand more what’s going on. So, that’s really interesting.

So, obviously, you’ve already mentioned your PIA but how does the work of your specific PIA, the neuroimaging PIA, how does that support your whole field of research?

Dr Dave Cash:

So, I think, particularly since the pandemic, our PIA has focused a lot on education. So, we used to do a big tutorial at AAIC that covered the basics of what neuroimaging does and, when we weren’t meeting in person for those couple years, Renaud and some of the other PIA members said, “Well, let’s just turn these into webinars and start offering these as webinars,” and they were really, really successful.

So, we have done a range of webinars over the years, I think we hit double digits most years. It’s been a lot recently even though, I’m sure, people are a little bit tired of Zoom and webinars at this point but they cover all the way from some of these more basic discussions on what structural or PET imaging is to more advanced research summary webinars on, say, on connectivity, on novel MRI sequences, novel PET tracers, big data, things like that.

So, we try and run all across the gamut and we’ve also been trying our hardest to make sure other researchers around the world are included. So, we’ve had a couple imaging webinars in Spanish, really had a lot of help there from [inaudible 00:18:53] over in Harvard to help set that up. Eduardo Zimmer helped us set up a webinar in Portuguese, primarily aimed at Brazilian researchers and other Portuguese-speaking researchers and Maura Malpetti and Martina Bocchetta helped us set up an Italian one recently. So, we’re trying to make sure that we’re trying to get webinars in other languages and provide the educational aspect, not just in England, in English.

Of course, we do a lot with our Alzheimer’s image consortium preconference, so we have over 500 people researched there. We’re trying to really differentiate that from the main AAIC session because there’s a lot of imaging just throughout the AAIC as well and what we’re trying to aim for is what are the new directions, where are we going with imaging, what’s new and different. It might not be so highlighted in the main session, might be a bit more technical, what are the new methods that are coming out and that people are using to analyze the data. And, in that, we really try and give preference to PhD early career researchers so that they have a platform to speak on this day.

And besides that, I think we try our hardest to recognize the best papers in the field. So, we have the Mony de Leon prize for the best papers in neuroimaging, so those are really prestigious big money awards. We get about 15 to 20 nominations over the year, we have a whole panel look over them and try and decide which are the best senior scientists, junior scientists, and training papers. And I think those are really prestigious that people have really talked about how much of a milestone that was for them when they got those awards.

So, continuing to just help encourage people to submit papers to that, solicit nominations, have a really good competitive process so that people can really feel that they’ve earned a well-deserved award when they get it.

Beth Eyre:

It sounds like you’re a very active PIA, it sounds like you do a lot of things and it’s really nice to hear about the education side because, I guess, neuroimaging can be quite hard to get into because the tools are so expensive. Your university may not have access to some of those tools and you may be analyzing data as part of your project and things like that. So, I think having those education webinars, explaining those fundamental building blocks of what you do is super exciting and then it’s nice to hear that you’re doing it in lots of different languages as well.

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah, just to add onto that point, something else we’ve started beginning to do is, we know there’s a big gap between talking about what a neuroimaging analysis looks like and actually doing one, so, last year, we started an immersive workshop on the Friday before AAIC where we’re just giving people an opportunity to work with some of these imaging packages so it was a four-hour thing. And what we did was we didn’t want people … We wanted to be rather equitable of a process so that everybody felt that they were getting the same experience. So, we didn’t want somebody who may have come from a big university with a prestigious grant and some super powered desktop replacement to have a different experience than somebody who may have a six-year-old laptop.

So, we put a bunch of virtual machines on the Cloud so that everybody accessed them through the internet, and we ran all the tutorials through that. So, nobody had to worry about, oh, how do I install SBM or Matlab or allowed to have Matlab on my machine, how do I do this free server thing and we gave a various [inaudible 00:22:50] recessions of structural MRI diffusion and functional. But you’re right, just getting involved with [inaudible 00:22:58] which is such an important part of neuroimaging analysis and how to find and install some of these novel packages that may not be expensive from a monetary perspective but expensive from a personal investment of time and learning how to do our Python stuff is an entry barrier and we’re trying to figure out how we can slowly make that barrier attack it in parts, if you will.

Beth Eyre:

It sounds like, as a PIA, you’re really trying to do that and that’s really exciting. And I think that’s really good for, obviously, with ISTAART and then where students get free registration to the PIAs, I think that’s really exciting because then, from an earlier stage, you can maybe start looking into these things that you’re interested in and it’s accessible from that earlier age which is nice. Because if you’re a first-year undergrad, that sounds accessible, at least to be interested in it and then start early on rather than it being at PhD level or master’s level so that’s really exciting.

So, could you tell us a little bit about your committee and how it’s all organized?

Dr Dave Cash:

So, the PIA itself, I’m not sure exactly when the PIA itself was founded in the midst of times but it’s been going along for a pretty long time because the origins of the PIA come from the very first Alzheimer’s Imaging Consortium Say. So, they conceived it in 1996 and, the first one, the pre-conference happened in ’98 so this will be the 25th year of AAIC coming around. And, right now, the way we’re organized is we have a pretty dedicated group of executive committee members.

So, first off, as we talked about before, we have a lot of educational content. So, we have not just one educational Chair but also the educational trainee who’s helping out. And last year, we had Tobey Betthauser running the education Chair and Katie Evans who is our trainee. And it was just so much work now, one person couldn’t have done it so they both did a great job helping to organize all the content we delivered. We have three at large members, so we have a senior scientist, a junior scientist, and a trainee committee member. And finally we have a community educations Chair and a vice chair, our actual Chair and our immediate past Chair.

So, most of those terms are for one year but, as I mentioned earlier, when you’re elected the educational Chair, you move on to the vice chair next year, the Chair after that. And it seemed a little daunting at the beginning but it’s a really fun group to be around. We meet once a month, we get a lot done through the [inaudible 00:25:40], through AAIC, through our workshops and the webinars. It’s been one of the best parts of my job, but we wouldn’t get all of that done if it weren’t for the great people at ISTAART. So, we work with Jody a lot and Oz and they’ve just been so instrumental in helping us get all these big projects done that we wouldn’t be able to without their excellent support.

Beth Eyre:

I completely second that. I’m really new to the executive committee but it’s amazing how Jody and Oz are able to just split themselves between everything and they just seem to know everything that’s going on. I know they might come to the vascular cognitive disorders PIA meetings and have just been at the neuroimaging one and they’re just so, so on it and it’s so, so great. And I think, speaking of every PIA, I’m sure everyone is very thankful and appreciative of all the work that they do for all the PIAs.

So, going to be bringing on to AAIC this year, so what does your PIA have planned? What are your aims for the year? Because I know we all have aims and things we want to achieve. Is the PIA doing anything at AAIC?

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah, we have quite a lot planned at AAIC so much so that I’m very much looking forward to the vacation after AAIC is over that I have planned. So, starting off, we have the getting started with neuroimaging analysis immersive workshops that’s on Friday, the 14th of July. We’ve done that for 40 members this year, it’s very heavily interactive both with the computers and with the facilitators. So, we’d like to roll it out to more people but, in terms of the network that’s required and the human time that’s required, 40 is a really, I think, a good number. So, it’s sold out, we’ve got a waiting list so hopefully we’ll be able to do some similar activities like that in the future. And then, on Saturday, we have the big Alzheimer’s Imaging Consortium Preconference.

So, we’ve thought a lot since restarting the AAIC, since the pandemic, how to make it worth people attending so that they feel like they’re getting something different than what they’re just going to see in AAIC. So, starting off, we have our traditional what have we learned, the year in review talk. So, that looks at all the neuroimaging papers in Alzheimer’s disease and related to dementia research over the past year. And this year, Indira Turney from Columbia is going to be giving that so we’re looking forward to that. It’s always the highlight, one of the highlights for me at the AAIC because everybody just does such an excellent job on it. And when you see the whole year put into the context of these big themes, you see just how many great discoveries have been made along the way.

We’ll have one plenary given by Liana Apostolova this year, so she is going to tell us all about the progress that the ILEAD study has been making, this really large multi-site early onset AD and atypical AD study that’s going on. Similar in vibes to DIAN and ADNI and GENFI, these big multi-site initiatives to collect enough data to really make sure we can characterize these diseases well. We’ll have sessions on microstructural imaging, on imaging neuroinflammation, imaging genetics and we’ll also have a data blitz so that’s where our PhD students and early career researchers will be presenting.

There’s a mentoring session at lunch, so we have some really excellent mentors in the field who are going to sit down with four or five people, just have a chat, talk about their careers, and help people who are newer in the field think about where they want to go in the near future. Since we’ve done that mentoring lunch session, I think we were all frustrated by how people would have to wolf down their lunch and then run to their poster to do a very quick poster session.

So, we’ve given a really nice, expanded poster session in the afternoon, I think it’s about 75 minutes, so we have a bit more time for people to really investigate the posters and interact with people on their posters. Especially all those people who put all their hard time into making those posters, letting them really have a chance to present their findings and stuff is important. And then, at the end of the day, it’s going to be a really exciting panel discussion on the role of brain imaging in the era of disease modifying treatment.

So, this is going to have Philip Scheltens, Tobey Betthauser and Michael Ewers being the moderators, but our panelists include Oscar Hansen, Gil Rabinovici, Reisa Sperling, Jonathan Schott. We have a really good group of people talking about just what it means, now that we have approved drugs, what is the role imaging is going to play, are we ready to deliver the imaging needed to deliver these therapies, things like that. So, all the imaging related aspects of the recent results with aducanumab and donanemab.

And then finally, as I said, we’re going to be doing our Mony de Leon Award ceremony. So, for the best prize or the best papers, we’ll also be giving the best oral talk at AAIC, and the best poster talk, and we have a couple guest stars coming for that award ceremony which I’m excited about. And then, after we have a chance to breathe and get into the actual start of AAIC, we have a featured research session on the role of neuroimaging in the area of anti-amyloid therapy.

So, again, talking about where imaging … So, expanding upon the panel discussion, what are the opportunities for imaging in research and clinical practice and that’s going to be happening on Wednesday, the 19th of July. So, have a couple of days when you can do some non-imaging stuff if you want to find out more about that and then come back to us for the FRS.

Beth Eyre:

Wow, you are definitely going to need a holiday after that. I was just like, “You just kept coming with it,” that’s so cool. I think it just shows what an active PIA you are so that’s super exciting. I’m really sad that I’m not going this year, I feel like I would’ve loved some of those things.

Dr Dave Cash:

Oh, no.

Beth Eyre:

Yeah, I know it’s sad.

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah.

Beth Eyre:

But I’ve been to a couple conferences so I can’t complain. Will you be presenting anything at all?

Dr Dave Cash:

Yeah, so I’ll be presenting at the FRS. So, my remit was to talk about when trajectories are deviating from abnormal, so thinking about all the elements that go into that. If we’re talking about PET, obviously that deviates much earlier than some of the structural MRI measures but also the heterogeneity that can arise. And one thing in particular is, in preclinical AD, vascular factors are really interesting, half independent, half part of the disease process. So, you can’t really talk about deviating from normal unless you have a better understanding of what normal is and how variable normal is itself. So, thinking about what just we mean by trajectories deviating from a normal range.

Beth Eyre:

Well, everyone, if you’re listening, don’t forget to see Dave at the focus research session. So, unfortunately, it’s nearly time for the end but I do have one final question. So, why should all of our listeners sign up to your PIA?

Dr Dave Cash:

I would say that imaging’s been at the heart of many discoveries in dementia research over the past 20 years and it’s not slowing down because we have new techniques, new modalities, lots of new directions to explore, new populations to explore them in so that we’re finally getting data and people who have been overlooked in the past is really important. And so, as a result, I’d say, with virtually every other PIA or every other research that people are interested in, there’s some neuroimaging related aspect that would be interesting to explore as part of your research.

And finally, something you mentioned earlier about summarizing these things and trying to mask out the variability. These are beautiful images, don’t just look at a number coming out of the spreadsheet or a report, just assume, oh, that’s free server, that’s just a number that I don’t need to understand. Look at these images, really see what they have to offer because there’s a lot more than just a single number. And so, I think understanding a bit more about what the images can and can’t do and what they’re really saying about the disease is important.

Beth Eyre:

And I’m an ECR so I guess I’m trying to see it from an ECR point of view, what do you think that ECRs can gain from joining your peers?

Dr Dave Cash:

Well, I think they can gain a lot of additional resources to find out how to do imaging. So, PhD students at big institutions probably have a lot of experts in the field that they can lean on, a whole lab infrastructure but we know that’s not the case for probably a majority of the institutions out there. And compounded by people who are postdocs who don’t have the traditional channels of learning that may be offered to PhD students, providing ways of getting into this data and not having to learn it all yourself is, I think, one area that we think is really useful and to access people who are doing this.

The one thing I was really heartened by was, last year, when we restarted the AAIC, just how excited everybody was to see each other again and what a community. And I think, from my biased viewpoint, a rather tight-knit inclusive community so that people are really excited to see each other, talk about their research, talk about their findings, get along well with each other but you can pick up a lot of skills.

So, even if it’s just learning how to interact with command line, that’s an important skill that can take you a lot of ways. But with the opportunity to do a lot of imaging now in Python and R, if you want to learn more about data science, learn more about statistical analysis and some of the interesting statistical challenges that imaging throws out at you, those skills can be applied in lots of different directions.

So, we see a lot of genetic analysis come to imaging, a lot of imaging analysis go to other techniques and places there. So, you’re not just learning how to do one thing that puts you in a dead end, you’re opening up a whole new area of skills that can help you no matter if you stay in dementia research or you move on to other different fields.

Beth Eyre:

That sounds awesome. I think you really just showcased all the exciting things that your PIA are doing, how exciting it is for the ECRs and all the skills that they can gain from it. And I guess, these days in research, you can’t really just do one thing and I guess that’s what your PIA is looking into. You’re giving people the opportunities to be able to learn those really technical and really hard analysis pipelines so that’s super exciting. But thank you so much, Dave, for taking the time to join us today and thank you so much-

Dr Dave Cash:

It’s been an absolute pleasure, thanks so much.

Beth Eyre:

Yeah, no, I’ve really enjoyed it. And thank you, everyone, for listening. So, you can find profiles of myself, Beth, and my brilliant guest and information on how to become involved in ISTAART on our website at the dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk and also at the alzheimers.org ISTAART. So, again, I’m Beth and you’ve been listening to the Relay Podcast from Dementia Researcher and the Alzheimer’s Association. So, make sure you hit subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast app to ensure you don’t miss any episodes. Thank you very much.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Race Against Dementia and the Alzheimer’s Association. Bringing you research, news, career tips and support.

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