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Single Brain Scan Can Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease Quickly and Accurately - SciTechDaily

Single Brain Scan Can Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease Quickly and Accurately - SciTechDaily

Single Brain Scan Can Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease Quickly and Accurately - SciTechDaily
Jun 21, 2022 2 mins, 6 secs

A new machine learning algorithm can diagnose Alzheimer’s disease from a single MRI brain scan, using a standard MRI machine available in most hospitals.

New research breakthrough uses machine learning technology to look at structural features within the brain, including in regions not previously associated with Alzheimer’s.

The advantage of the technique is its simplicity and the fact that it can identify the disease at an early stage when it can be very difficult to diagnose.

Although there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, getting a diagnosis quickly at an early stage helps patients.

Being able to accurately identify patients at an early stage of the disease will also help researchers to understand the brain changes that trigger the disease, and support development and trials of new treatments.

Doctors currently use a raft of tests to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, including memory and cognitive tests and brain scans.

They divided the brain into 115 regions and allocated 660 different features, such as size, shape, and texture, to assess each region.

They then trained the algorithm to identify where changes to these features could accurately predict the existence of Alzheimer’s disease.

Using data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, the team tested their approach on brain scans from over 400 patients with early and later stage Alzheimer’s, healthy controls and patients with other neurological conditions, including frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

It was also able to distinguish between early and late-stage Alzheimer’s with fairly high accuracy, in 79 percent of patients.

Professor Eric Aboagye, from Imperial’s Department of Surgery and Cancer, who led the research, said: “Currently no other simple and widely available methods can predict Alzheimer’s disease with this level of accuracy, so our research is an important step forward.

The new system spotted changes in areas of the brain not previously associated with Alzheimer’s disease, including the cerebellum (the part of the brain that coordinates and regulates physical activity) and the ventral diencephalon (linked to the senses, sight and hearing).

Paresh Malhotra, who is a consultant neurologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and a researcher in Imperial’s Department of Brain Sciences, said: “Although neuroradiologists already interpret MRI scans to help diagnose Alzheimer’s, there are likely to be features of the scans that aren’t visible, even to specialists.

Using an algorithm able to select texture and subtle structural features in the brain that are affected by Alzheimer’s could really enhance the information we can gain from standard imaging techniques.”.

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