Submitted by lac59 on Wed, 16/07/2025 - 13:08
Dr Timothy Rittman was featured in the Times on the coverage of the 100,000th person scanned for the whole body scanning project by UK Biobank. His lab have been using some of the first tranches of scanning data for research on Alzheimer's disease and rarer neurodegenerative disorders.
Read the article mentioning Dr Rittman in the Times: Husband and wife offer up bodies to complete UK Biobank scan project
Read about the UK Biobank milestone on the BBC: Biggest human imaging study scans 100,000th UK volunteer - BBC News
About Tim Rittman's research with the UK Biobank data
Tim has used the UK Biobank data to identify subtle early cognitive changes years before a diagnosis of dementia, and has collaborated with the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology (Prof Pietro Lio and Dr Tiago Azevedo) to detect signs of Alzheimer's disease on MRI brain scans in healthy UK biobank participants using artificial intelligence.
The lab's current work (led by PhD student Amir Ebneabassi) in collaboration with the Department of Psychology (Richard Bethlehem, Varun Warrier) is extending this work in the UK Biobank to understand the genetic factors underlying structural brain changes on MRI that put people at risk of Alzheimer's disease.
The lab is also working to detect rarer neurodegenerative disorders in the UK Biobank using MRI and AI (Marion Peres), and collecting brain scans in memory clinics using the UK Biobank protocol to translate AI algorithms for routine clinical use (Zahara Girones, Tanja Schmidt) in collaboration with Guy Williams (Dept Clinical Neurosciences) and Zoe Kourtzi (Dept Psychiatry).
