Imaging as a biomarker in drug discovery for Alzheimer’s disease: is MRI a suitable technology?

This review provides perspectives on the utility of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a neuroimaging approach in the development of novel treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. These considerations were generated in a roundtable at a recent Wellcome Trust meeting that included experts from academia and industry. It was agreed that MRI, either structural or functional, could be used as a diagnostic, for assessing worsening of disease status, for monitoring vascular pathology, and for stratifying clinical trial populations. It was agreed also that MRI implementation is in its infancy, requiring more evidence of association with the disease states, test-retest data, better standardization across multiple clinical sites, and application in multimodal approaches which include other imaging technologies, such as positron emission tomography, electroencephalography, and magnetoencephalography.