Dr. Ana Franceschi serves as Director of Dementia Imaging and Director of Molecular Neuroimaging at Northwell Health and is an Associate Professor of Radiology at the Barbara and Donald Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. Dr. Franceschi is highly motivated and dedicated to making significant contributions to the neurological molecular imaging filed. Specifically, she has developed a special emphasis on the advancement of brain PET/MRI and hybrid imaging techniques in dementia and neurodegenerative disease. Dr. Franceschi was awarded the 2021 Foundation of the ASNR Boerger Research Fund for Alzheimer’s Disease and Neurocognitive Disorders for the project “[18F] PI-2620 in Primary Progressive Aphasia” (Franceschi AM, PI), with the goal of characterizing biodistribution of abnormal tau accumulation in PPA subtypes using the novel second generation tracer PI-2620 and correlating these findings with clinical disease severity and neurodegeneration. She is also PI for the project “Utility of [18F] PI-2620 as Universal Biomarker for the A/T/N Classification of Dementia and Neurodegenerative Disease”, which aims to establish the efficacy of PI-2620 as a single, universal biomarker for the A/T/N classification scheme of dementia, with the eventual goal of its use in descriptive classification, patient selection and target engagement assessment in disease-modifying clinical treatment trials. In addition to multiple scientific publications on this topic, Dr. Franceschi is the lead editor of the textbook Hybrid PET/MR Neuroimaging: A Comprehensive Approach (Springer Nature, 2022). She also serves as the Senior Editor for the Molecular Imaging section of the AJNR, Chair of the ACR’s Dementia Workgroup, on the ASNR’s Alzheimer’s, ARIA, and Dementia Study Group, and contributes to leadership decisions as a member of the AJNR and WJNM Editorial Boards.
Lecture: ARIA in the Era of Disease-modifying Therapies
