Abstract

Drug development involves huge and extremely expensive global experiments, which at late phase can involve many thousands of patients recruited at 100s of hospitals all over the world. Imaging biomarkers have the potential to provide standardized, quantitative measurements of patient eligibility for the study, drug side effects, and drug efficacy, but deploying them in such global studies has great challenges. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is an area of huge unmet medical need, and huge sums are being invested in testing potential new treatments for AD, and drug companies are being very ambitious in their use of sophisticated image analysis methods in these studies. The technical and regulatory challenges of these applications is quite different from the normal focus of image analysis research, but the potential benefit of overcoming these challenges is better tools to help bring safe and effective medicines to patients.