Hidden Signatures of Parkinson's Disease Uncovered by Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute collaborates with Google Research to identify new cellular characteristics of disease in skin cells from Parkinson's patients. A study published today (March 25, 2022) in Nature Communications unveils a new platform for discovering cellular signatures of disease that integrates robotic systems for studying patient cells with artificial intelligence methods for image analysis. Using their automated cell culture platform, scientists at the NYSCF Research Institute collaborated with Google Research to successfully identify new cellular hallmarks of Parkinson's disease by creating and profiling over a million images of skin cells from a cohort of 91 patients and healthy controls. "Traditional drug discovery isn't working very well, particularly for complex diseases like Parkinson's," noted NYSCF CEO Susan L. Solomon, JD. "The robotic technology NYSCF has built allows us to generate vast amounts of data from large populations of patients, and discover new signatures of disease as an entirely new basis for discovering drugs that actually work." "This is an ideal demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence for disease research," added Marc Berndl, Software Engineer at Google Research.