04 January 2019

AI Detects Alzheimer’s Six Years Before Diagnosis

Artificial intelligence could one day change the lives of people facing an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, according to a new study by researchers at UC, San Francisco. They fed a common type of brain scans to a machine-learning algorithm, and it learned to diagnose early-stage Alzheimer’s disease about six years before a clinical diagnosis could be made. The AI’s diagnostic skills could give doctors a much-needed head start on treating the degenerative disease. They focused on PET scans that monitored glucose levels across the brain, because glucose is the primary source of fuel for brain cells. Once the cells become diseased, they eventually stop using glucose, making it an important level to track.


Researchers trained the algorithm on PET scans from patients who were eventually diagnosed with either Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, or no disorder. The algorithm began to figure out how to predict Alzheimer’s disease. Eventually, it was able to correctly identify 92% of patients who developed Alzheimer’s disease in the first test set and 98% in the second test set, making correct predictions on average 75.8 months (for the math-impaired, that’s almost six years) before the patient received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. While the algorithm isn’t quite ready for clinical use, it could eventually help doctors start treating patients much earlier.

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