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. Prof. Beg will review his 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 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 training opportunities which address such challenges and cater to diverse audiences.