Data Sciences Institute - Aging and AI Public talk

Automated Brain and Body Quantification from CT, PET, and MRI for Precision Medicine
This talk presents a unified framework for automated, quantitative phenotyping across brain and body imaging, integrating prior work in neurodegenerative biomarkers with a scalable, whole-body analysis platform. I will review our work on brain quantification including MRI-based dementia scoring that captures structural atrophy patterns, and FDG-PET–based dementia scoring that reflects regional metabolic dysfunction. These methods demonstrate how high-dimensional imaging data can be distilled into clinically meaningful biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis, and disease monitoring.

Prof. Beg will then introduce recent work on building DAFS, an automated platform for whole-body segmentation and quantification from CT now FDA 510K cleared software medical device, with extensions to PET-CT integration. DAFS enables comprehensive extraction of anatomical and functional biomarkers, including skeletal muscle compartments, adipose tissue depots, major organs, and vascular features, alongside region-specific PET tracer uptake. By transforming routine imaging into structured, multi-organ quantitative data, the platform supports large-scale phenotyping and systems-level analysis of disease, building predictive models for clinical outcomes as well as quantitative monitoring organs and tissues as a function of disease, aging, and interventions.

The convergence of brain-specific biomarkers with whole-body quantification opens new opportunities for precision medicine, including cross-organ interaction studies, improved risk stratification, and more sensitive endpoints for clinical trials. Prof. Beg will discuss how data-driven integration of multi-modality imaging (CT, MRI, PET) within a unified quantitative framework has the potential to replace subjective qualitative interpretation with reproducible, data-driven personalized decision-making.

This event is part of Advancing Aging and Neurodegeneration Research through Data Science, an Emergent Data Science Program that aims to provide a suite of training opportunities which address such challenges and cater to diverse audiences.

For more information, please visit: https://datasciences.utoronto.ca/brain-body-quantification.

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