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About the talk: This presentation explores the reliability of resting-state cerebrovascular reactivity (rs-CVR) as a promising non-invasive biomarker for tracking vascular cognitive impairment. We will discuss the findings from a longitudinal "human phantom" dataset, which analyzed functional MRI scans of a single healthy subject acquired across several sites across Canada to quantify technical variance. The session will highlight how scanner hardware introduces significant, spatially heterogeneous biases , and demonstrates why implementing study-specific harmonization is critical for ensuring the integrity of large-scale neuroimaging trials.
Learning Objectives:
Understand the role of resting-state cerebrovascular reactivity as a biomarker for early pathogenesis in dementia.
Identify how hardware-induced technical errors and scanner variations confound multi-site MRI data.
Evaluate the effectiveness of linear harmonization in reducing inter-site variance down to the intra-site physiological noise floor.
About the speaker: Rémi is a PhD student at Université Laval specializing in neuroimaging, computational modeling, and cerebrovascular hemodynamics, with a focus on Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Using artificial intelligence, their current work explores how different vascular imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance angiography and functional MRI, can serve as early, non-invasive biomarkers for dementia.