NIFD (FTLDNI)

NIFD, the LONI project name for the Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration Neuroimaging Initiative (FTLDNI), is a longitudinal observational study of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). It was set up by the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF, led by Howard Rosen and funded by the National Institute on Aging under grant R01 AG032306, reusing the infrastructure of the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. The goal was to find which imaging methods and brain regions follow FTLD progression with the least variance, so that future drug trials can be sized. Data are distributed by LONI through the Image and Data Archive after an application and the data use agreement shared with the companion 4RTNI study.

Composition

The grant planned 120 patients with FTLD and 120 age-matched healthy controls, followed for about one year. Patients carry clinical diagnoses within the FTLD spectrum, such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and the semantic and nonfluent variants of primary progressive aphasia. LONI states that NIFD uses the same controls as 4RTNI. The number of participants actually released is not published by the study.

Acquisition

Data were collected at three North American sites: UCSF, Massachusetts General Hospital and Mayo Clinic Rochester. MRI was acquired at 3T on Siemens Tim Trio scanners at UCSF and MGH and on a GE scanner at Mayo. The imaging protocol matches that of 4RTNI and covers structural MRI for gray matter volume, diffusion imaging and arterial spin labeling perfusion. The grant planned FDG-PET for all participants and PIB amyloid PET for all patients, plus blood, urine and cerebrospinal fluid; no public source confirms that the PET scans were released.

Annotations

Diagnoses were made at a multidisciplinary consensus conference using the criteria current at enrollment. Clinical, neuropsychological and functional assessments with an informant interview accompany the images.

Known limitations

No data descriptor reports the size or composition of the shared release, so no counts are given here. The only planned numbers come from the grant abstract. Follow-up intervals are irregular, and diffusion and ASL analyses in the study papers used UCSF data only. LONI warns that downloaded data may be preliminary and asks users to record the data version.