New AI tool could help diagnose Alzheimer's disease earlier

A new artificial intelligence language-processing tool could potentially help detect cognitive impairment and mental degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, researchers at Boston University say. Their findings, which were published in The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, suggest that a machine-learning computational model could identify cognitive decline through audio recordings of neuropsychological tests. "It can form the basis of an online tool that could reach everyone and could increase the number of people who get screened early," said Ioannis Paschalidis, a professor of engineering and one of the researchers at Boston University, in a news release. The computational model, which does not require in-person assessments, could ultimately help clinicians triage the urgency of patients' symptoms more efficiently, allowing them to allocate resources without replacing follow-up processes for diagnosis, she said. Using automated speech recognition software, the program transcribes interviews and, by encoding them into numbers, detects patterns that assess the likelihood and severity of a patient's cognitive impairment.