Astrophysics and AI may offer key to early dementia diagnosis - BSMS

Crucial early diagnosis of dementia in general practice could improve thanks to a computer model designed in a collaboration between Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and astrophysicists at the University of Sussex. Currently, only two-thirds of people with dementia in the UK receive a formal diagnosis, and many receive it late in the disease process, meaning that a large number are missing out on the care that could help them achieve a good quality of life. The team, led by Dr Elizabeth Ford, Senior Lecturer in Primary Care Research at BSMS, used data from GP patient records to create a list of 70 indicators related to the onset of dementia and recorded in the five years before diagnosis. Working with data scientists from astrophysics, they then tried several types of machine-learning models to identify patterns of clinical information in patient records before a dementia diagnosis. The best model was able to identify 70% of dementia cases before the GP, but also threw up a number of false positives.