Overview
Parkinson's disease (PD) in India emerges nearly a decade earlier than in European populations. This PhD project will use structural, diffusion and fMRI-based brain age models on the NIMHANS Young and late onset Parkinson’s disease (YLOPD) imaging cohort (PD patients and healthy controls), benchmarked against international PD and healthy control datasets, to test whether accelerated brain ageing contributes to this earlier disease onset.
About this opportunity
Project Description:
Parkinson’s disease is strongly age-related, yet patients in India develop PD roughly 8-10 years earlier than in Europe and North America (Prasad et al, 2022). The reasons why remain unclear. Brain age models using structural, diffusion, and functional MRI to predict biological brain age against chronological age offer a direct way to test whether accelerated ageing is part of the answer. A brain-age gap has been linked in other populations to neurodegenerative risk, cognitive decline, and disease severity, but has never been examined in an Indian PD cohort.
This project applies structural, diffusion-MRI and resting-state fMRI-based brain age models to the NIMHANS Young and late onset Parkinson’s disease (YLOPD) cohort — one of the largest phenotyped PD imaging archives of its kind, with both patients and matched healthy controls. The student will harmonise and quality-control the multimodal dataset, identify and preprocess suitable international comparator datasets (such as UK Biobank, and PPMI), and apply cross-site harmonisation methods to address scanner and protocol differences. Validated brain-age models will then be trained and benchmarked against published international algorithms and applied across three comparisons. First, Indian healthy controls against international norms, to determine whether any offset reflects a true population difference rather than a modelling artefact. Second, Indian PD patients against Indian controls, to determine whether PD impacts the brain-age gap, and whether this tracks age at onset, motor and cognitive severity, and vascular or metabolic risk where available. Finally Indian PD patients against international PD cohorts matched as closely as possible on disease duration and severity.
Novelty
Brain-age modelling has not previously been applied to an Indian neurodegenerative cohort with a matched control arm and international benchmarking, and never to the question of PD’s earlier onset in India specifically. The project draws on YLOPD, one of the largest systematically curated PD neuroimaging datasets from South Asia with over 500 PD patients and 200 healthy controls, acquired on a single 3T scanner with deep clinical phenotyping giving the student a substantial, ready-to-analyse dataset rather than years of recruitment. The successful candidate will be based at the University of Liverpool and will spend time at NIMHANS, Bengaluru, working directly with the movement disorders group and the YLOPD dataset, under the collaborative supervision of Prof. Simon Keller (Liverpool) and Dr. Shweta Prasad, Prof. Ravi Yadav, Prof. Jitender Saini, and Dr. Vikram (NIMHANS). The work is positioned to contribute to underrepresented, LMIC-derived data in global PD neuroimaging research, and findings are expected to feed into peer-reviewed publications and international conference presentations over the course of the PhD.
Training
The project provides training in structural, diffusion and functional MRI preprocessing pipelines, machine learning approaches to brain-age prediction, and cross-site/cross-scanner data harmonisation, along with experience validating models against published international brain-age algorithms and working with large public neuroimaging repositories. The time at NIMHANS offers an exceptional opportunity for international research experience, exposure to a richly phenotyped clinical-imaging environment, and the independence that marks a competitive research career.
Structure of studies and Dual PhD registration
Funded by the Pratiksha Trust this four-year Dual PhD Programme between the University of Liverpool and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, India, will provide a PhD award from both institutions. Funding will cover stipend at the UKRI level, tuition fees (home rate only; this PhD is only open to UK-based students), research support fees and travel costs.
The successful candidate must commit to spending up to two years at the University of Liverpool and up to two years at NIMHANS in Bengaluru (India). The expected pattern of study for this studentship is Year 1 in Liverpool, Year 2 and 3 based at NIMHANS, Bangalore, India, then year 4 back in Liverpool.