Max Elliott
@maxwellelliott.bsky.social
54 followers 99 following 12 posts
Brain and Cognitive Aging Researcher Incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota
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Reposted by Max Elliott
jingnandu.bsky.social
Our new paper is out now in Neuron! 🎉 With @vaibhavtripathi.bsky.social @maxwellelliott.bsky.social Joanna Ladopoulou, Wendy Sun, Mark Eldaief, and Randy Buckner

Paper link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reposted by Max Elliott
natureportfolio.nature.com
A paper in Nature Aging describes the Dunedin Pace of Aging Calculated from #NeuroImaging measure, an approach that uses a single brain image to measure how fast a person is aging and can help predict mortality or the risk of developing chronic disease. go.nature.com/3GADPij #medsky 🧪
This is figure 2, which shows DunedinPACNI model validation and feature importance.
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
Most importantly, this is just the beginning! To estimate DunedinPACNI in your data, all you need is a single T1-weighted structural MRI and our publicly available tool. Please use it and share it widely! github.com/etw11/Dunedi...
GitHub - etw11/DunedinPACNI: Code to estimate DunedinPACNI scores from FreeSurfer parcellations of brain MRI data.
Code to estimate DunedinPACNI scores from FreeSurfer parcellations of brain MRI data. - etw11/DunedinPACNI
github.com
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
Across several datasets, faster DunedinPACNI was associated with poor cognition, physical frailty, poor health, and worse cognitive status. Furthermore, faster DunedinPACNI predicted faster hippocampal atrophy, earlier onset of chronic disease, dementia, and mortality.
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
Building on the epigenetic clock and brain-age literatures, we built a "next-generation" brain aging clock by predicting an individual's rate of longitudinal biological aging from a single brain scan.

We call our measure "DunedinPACNI"
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
Do you want to estimate brain aging from a single MRI scan?

Check out our latest work in Nature Aging

"DunedinPACNI estimates the longitudinal Pace of Aging from a single brain image to track health and disease"
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
This was a massive team effort - @jingnandu.bsky.social, @jaredniels.bsky.social, Randy Buckner and many others!
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
The high precision afforded by cluster scanning promises to accelerate clinical trials, lead to personalized biomarkers, and be a useful tool for the science of individual differences in brain development, aging, and disease. Check out the preprints for more details!
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
This precision allowed us to see clear deviations from expected aging when they arose. In a striking example, we detected an aggressive atrophy trajectory in an individual who was cognitively unimpaired at baseline but then went on to develop an MCI diagnosis.
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
Critically, this reduction in error allowed us to see changes in individuals within just one year. Here are hippocampal aging trajectories in 8 individuals across one year where you can see large individual differences and the benefits of pooling multiple measurements
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
We found a solution - cluster scanning. Utilizing the latest advances in scan acceleration we collected several short, 1-minute long T1s to drive to measurement error within individuals ... and it worked!
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
A key challenge for brain aging is to measure brain changes in individuals rather than group averages. This has huge implications for clinical trials, basic aging research and individual differences. However, we lack the precision needed to detect changes over short intervals.
maxwellelliott.bsky.social
New preprint!!!

We can reliably detect brain changes in individuals in just a year by collecting several rapid 1-minute T1s at each time point - i.e. "cluster scanning". We discovered large individual differences, even in healthy adults

t.co/oxD9EBdbvu
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.21.25322553v1
t.co
Reposted by Max Elliott
andersfjell.bsky.social
Really interesting from @maxwellelliott.bsky.social et al: 1-year brain changes reliably detected by cluster-scanning - burst of multiple, very short T1's. Great potential for tracking individual differences in brain change over clinically meaningful intervals. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...