Machine Learning and NLP Are Emerging as Key Tools for Diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease

Winterlight Labs, a spinoff from the University of Toronto, is using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to identify people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other forms of dementia based on patterns in their recorded speech. The World Health Organization estimates that 47.5 million people in the world have dementia, which is defined as a chronic or persistent disorder of the brain marked by lapses in memory, personality changes, and impaired reasoning. In developed countries, AD is one of the most costly of all diseases to treat. Every year in the United States, 236,000 people are diagnosed with AD. There are an additional 100,000 healthy individuals over the age of 60 who seek AD screening.