About the AggieBrain Initiative
More than 7 million people in the United States are living with dementia today, and that number is projected to grow dramatically by 2050.
To meet this urgent public health challenge, UC Davis is launching the AggieBrain Initiative—an interdisciplinary effort that brings together expertise from UC Davis Health’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the UC Davis College of Engineering. Our goal is to modernize and accelerate how neurodegenerative diseases that cause dementia are identified, measured, and studied. This includes Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, frontotemporal degeneration, and mixed-etiology dementia.
At the heart of this work is neuropathology, where expert evaluation of brain tissue helps define and unlock the secrets of these devastating diseases. Whole slide imaging technologies make it possible to digitize brain slides at scale—improving the ability to share data, build curated archives, and develop advanced image analysis methods. Recent breakthroughs in machine learning (ML) are already transforming medical imaging, augmenting the abilities of experts by enabling automated quantification and screening workflows.
The new AggieBrain Initiative leverages and enhances research accomplished through close collaboration by the two colleges, and takes the next step: building an intelligence layer that accelerates brain research itself. AggieBrain is funded by the Susan and Charles Berghoff Foundation, with major support from William Ballhaus and Darrin Mollett. The initiative is geared toward machine learning engineers, and will serve as a repository for annotated datasets while providing infrastructure for developing a multi-agent computational framework designed to reason over complex neuropathology data, coordinate specialized AI models, and support researchers across disciplines. Our new direction moves beyond single-model automation toward collaborative, agentic systems that help scientists explore hypotheses, validate findings, and rapidly iterate on new ideas.
AggieBrain is the evolution of long-term partnership between UC Davis Professors Brittany Dugger (Pathology) and Chen-Nee Chuah (Engineering). This initiative scales up AI-driven brain pathology pipelines originally established through the foundational support of the NIH, NSF, UC Noyce Initiative, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.