While a full on cure for Alzheimer’s has yet to be discovered, researchers are making progress when it comes to early detection. This will allow patients to seek out treatment that can help slow down the effects of the disease, or at least give them more time to get their affairs in order and prepare for the inevitable.
Recently it seems that researchers at the University of Bari in Italy have made some pretty impressive progress when it comes to early detection, and with the use of AI, it seems that they have managed to develop an algorithm that is capable of detect Alzheimer’s as early as a decade before symptoms can appear.
What the researchers have done is that they have given their AI 67 MRI scans from 38 Alzheimer’s patients, and an additional 29 from those without it. The scans were then further divided into small regions and the AI was then used to analyze the neural connectivity between them. They then put the AI to the test by scanning the brains of 148 subjects, 48 of whom had Alzheimer’s, while another 48 had mild cognitive impairments that later led to Alzheimer’s.
The AI was successful in its diagnosis 86% of the time when it came to Alzheimer’s, and 84% of the time when it came to mild cognitive impairments. The system is far from ready to be used for mainstream purposes due to the limited number of scans it was tested on, but so far it seems that it shows quite a bit of promise.
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