Dr. Paul K. Crane, professor (General Internal Medicine), is the principal investigator of the parent grant called “ADNI Psychometrics.”
ADNI refers to the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, an American–Canadian research partnership. The NIH supplement enables Dr. Chun Wang, assistant professor (UW College of Education) and graduate student Ruoyi Zhu to join the team.
“This is a very exciting opportunity to foster this new partnership between my research group and Dr. Wang and Ms. Zhu,” said Dr. Crane.
“We will be able to see how tools that have been developed and refined in educational testing settings can be applied to improve our statistical toolkit for important questions in Alzheimer’s disease research.”
This particular project focuses on applying state-of-the-art Bayesian approaches to ADNI’s cognitive testing data to see whether these approaches may improve the identification of people at highest risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. If these approaches prove successful, they will enable targeted enrollment of people at the highest risk in intervention trials, which could speed the identification of successful treatments to prevent the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
“I am super excited about this opportunity to work with Dr. Crane on applying the Bayesian Item Response Theory methodology to the ADNI data. This will not only expand the impact of this useful psychometric tool as well as broaden my own research scope, but also provide a training opportunity for my doctoral student, Ms. Zhu,” said Dr. Wang.
Dr. Crane agrees. “I am excited by this new partnership and eager to see what comes next!”
