Rush

The MarkVCID site at Rush University Medical Center and Illinois Institute of Technology is led by Drs. Konstantinos Arfanakis and Julie Schneider. Dr. Konstantinos Arfanakis is Core Leader of the Biomarker/Neuroimaging Core of the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (ADRC) at Rush University Medical Center. Dr. Arfanakis is also a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Director of the MRI Program at IIT. He has expertise in multi-parametric in-vivo and ex-vivo MRI in aging and dementia, MRI pathology investigations, development of MRI based biomarkers of age-related neuropathologies, and brain atlas development. Dr. Julie Schneider is Director and senior neuropathologist of the Rush ADRC and Professor of Pathology (Neuropathology) and Neurology at Rush University Medical Center. Dr. Schneider oversees all of the activities of the Neuropathology and Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center (RADC).

Study Recruitment

The Rush University/Illinois Institute of Technology site will recruit, enroll, and longitudinally assess a community-based group of 300 African Americans, Caucasians, and Latinos without dementia. Participants are recruited from the Rush Memory and Aging Project (MAP), Religious Orders Study (ROS), Minority Aging Research Study (MARS), Clinical Core (CC) and Latino Core (LATC) of the Rush ADRC. These projects are longitudinal, clinical-pathologic cohort studies of aging that recruit non-demented individuals and have high follow-up rates. Recruitment focuses on the large pool of participants of the parent studies who endorse subjective cognitive complaints or have mild cognitive impairment. The Rush University/Illinois Institute of Technology team developed the MRI Arteriosclerosis (ARTS) biomarker, which is currently undergoing testing in MarkVCID2. ARTS is a fully automated marker of arteriolosclerosis and was developed using machine learning on MRI and pathology data from the same community-based older adult populations.

Study Team