Researchers train AI to spot Alzheimer's disease ahead of diagnosis

While Alzheimer's disease affects tens of millions of people worldwide, it remains difficult to detect early on. But researchers exploring whether AI can play a role in detecting Alzheimer's in patients are finding that it may be a valuable tool for helping spot the disease. Researchers in California recently published a study in the journal Radiology, and they demonstrated that, once trained, a neural network was able to accurately diagnose Alzheimer's disease in a small number of patients, and it did so based on brain scans taken years before those patients were actually diagnosed by physicians. The team used brain images -- FDG-PET images -- to train and test their neural network. With this type of imaging, FDG, a radioactive type of glucose, is injected into a person's bloodstream, and then that person's bodily tissue, including brain tissue, takes it up as it would regular glucose.