The project H2020 MSCA-RISE 691110 MICROBRADAM is now ending. During its 4-years activities, the Consortium has developed innovative MRI technologies to investigate neurological diseases, and has improved knowledge sharing between leading EU and US institutions.

The MICROBRADAM collaboration between scientists in Europe and US, thanks to the grant awarded as a part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions under Horizon 2020, has developed a multimodal approach for the early diagnosys of Parkinson's Disease based on MRI images.

"We still lack an effective treatment for Parkinson's Disease, however our new approach has the potential to identify the early damages to tissue caused by pathology, thus helping an earlier diagnosys and - in perspective -  the assessment of new treatments", declared Federico Giove, coordinator of the European project.

The MICROBRADAM partnership includes institution and scientists from Finland, Czech Republic, Italy and USA, and aims to transfer the newly developed technologies to the clinical practice.

Although the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been long recognized to be a profound deficit in episodic memory, subtle semantic deficits are often observed in AD patients even in the early stages of the illness, suggesting an early deterioration of brain areas underpinning semantic cognition. In this work we used resting-state fMRI to investigate the functional integrity of the semantic control network in mild AD patients. We found disease-associated functional alterations in key regions subserving semantic processing.

The BOLD fMRI signal is usually exploited to map the brain activity, thanks to the local processing of inputs in the brain. In this work we showed that, if a cortical region is forced in a highly homogeneous state because of a stereotyped stimulation, then an amount of information can be coded in the temporal oscillations of the signal

The project H2020 MSCA-RISE 691110 MICROBRADAM developed innovative MRI technologies to investigate neurological diseases. Among the most striking features of the project was the involvement of young researchers from EU countries, which had the opportunity of travelling to different laboratories involved in the project during secondments that lasted 4-12 months.