3 D Microscopy to enhance disease understanding

The understanding of diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s is set to take a step forward following groundbreaking technology which will enable cell analysis using automated 3D microscopy.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. There is no cure for the disease, which worsens as it progresses, and eventually leads to death. AD is diagnosed in people over 65 years of age, although the less-prevalent early-onset Alzheimer's can occur much earlier. Failure to diagnose Alzheimer’s in a timely manner would mean failure to improve the quality of life for millions of people. AD is predicted to affect 1 in 85 people globally by 2050.

 The cause for most Alzheimer's cases is still essentially unknown and even today AD, cannot be cured and is degenerative in nature.

The most common symptom in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease development  is difficulty in remembering recent events. Early symptoms are often mistakenly thought to be 'age-related' concerns, or manifestations of stress. As the disease advances, symptoms can include confusion, irritability and aggression, mood swings, trouble with language, and long-term memory loss.

For the very same reason, early stage detection of AD is very much essential and an initiative between the Griffith’s School of Information Communication Technology and the Eskitis Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, the technology will allow the automated identification, separation and analysis of cells as complex as nerve cells in the brain, would definitely help this cause.

“Scientists and clinicians will be able to superimpose multiple data sets in three dimensions using automated techniques and then conduct detailed analysis of the data in a far improved way from the two dimensional microscopy that is currently available,” said Dr Adrian Meedeniya, manager of Griffith’s Imaging and Image Analysis Facility.

 

Microscopy and image acquisition technology has undergone a recent revolution, with modern microscopes generating huge multi-dimensional data sets that can easily fill an entire hard drive. Manually analyzing these data-sets is incredibly time consuming and prone to human error and bias.

“One of the main motivations for establishing this collaboration with the School of ICT was to create the technology to efficiently deal with these huge data sets,” Dr Meedeniya said.

“We will be able to use this technology to rapidly increase our understanding of the way neuro-degenerative disorders affect nerve cell function in the brain.”

Underpinned by neural network algorithms (artificial intelligence), the cutting-edge technology is expected to be widely used in disease research within a matter of a few years.

The new groundbreaking 3 D Microscopy imaging technique would definitely help in early stage detection of  the disease which in turn would lead to improved quality of life of patient and caregiver; for Alzheimer's disease is known for placing a great burden on caregivers; the pressures can be wide-ranging, involving social, psychological, physical, and economic elements of the caregiver's life.