Israeli Chatbot Could Diagnose Early Alzheimer's Disease

Hundreds of drugs have been developed to address Alzheimer's disease, says Dr. Shahar Arzy, director of the computational neuropsychiatry lab at Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. "Do you know how many have been found effective? But if patients could be diagnosed in the preclinical stages of the disease, perhaps some of the new biological medications showing excellent results in other domains of neurology could be effective when applied early enough in the course of Alzheimer's disease. Arzy and his colleagues have developed a computer-based system to ferret out early signs of Alzheimer's. The system, dubbed Clara ("a hint towards'clarity of mind,'" Arzy says), is an artificial intelligence-based chatbot that asks patients questions about themselves and their relationships to people, places and events. Clara then uses machine learning to compare that information to a baseline in order to generate a computer-based test tailored for the specific individual that can diagnose very early Alzheimer's. Arzy's team published research results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in the American Psychological Association's journal Neuropsychology showing the method to be 95 percent accurate. Alzheimer's affects the brain's "orientation system" that dictates how a person relates to the world outside. "It's easy to test memory," Arzy says. "I can give you three words and ask you to retrieve them." For example, a patient might remember both the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy and the election of Barack Obama but be confused about which came first. Or a patient might recognize his or her spouse and doctor, but not be able to distinguish which person is standing closer. Orientation can be measured in a functional MRI. Your brain will light up differently if you see a picture of your own daughter vs. someone else's child or a generic image of a baby. "The overlap between how the self is oriented to the world and the brain mechanisms that are disturbed by Alzheimer's disease is astonishing,"Arzy says. In the preclinical stages of Alzheimer's, the orientation system begins to deteriorate, "but people can still compensate for this by tapping into other resources like memory," Arzy says. "They can write down a note, for example.