Before being one of our stellar neuroimaging data analysts, Marlene Lin joined our lab as a student in the UCSF Masters program in Health Data Science in late 2023. For her capstone project, she worked on the implementation and test of the Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) algorithm to identify subtypes of patients with Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease using tau-PET data in the LEADS cohort.
Her (very thorough and careful) work is now published in Brain Communications. Briefly, Marlene identified three tau-PET-based subtypes:
- Subtype 1/Typical (n = 144, 40%) showed a predominant bilateral temporoparietal pattern typical of Alzheimer’s disease.
- Subtype 2/Left temporal (n = 111, 31%) showed predominant left temporal binding.
- Subtype 3/Posterior (n = 104, 29%) showed early and permeating occipitoparietal involvement.
Go check the paper to know more about these subtypes, including differences in amyloid-PET, MRI, clinical and cognitive variables, and even longitudinal outcomes!
