Doctors have trouble diagnosing Alzheimer's. AI doesn't

Alzheimer's disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose -- the only way doctors can tell for sure that a patient has the deadly neurodegenerative condition is to examine his or her brain during an autopsy after death. That uncertainty is hard on patients who are starting to experience memory loss, which could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or another, more treatable form of dementia. It also poses a major challenge to the researchers who are working to come up with effective treatments for the disease, which afflicts some 5 million Americans. But now artificial intelligence is learning to do what doctors can't. Separate teams of scientists at the University of Bari in Italy and McGill University in Canada have created artificial intelligence algorithms that can look at brain scans of people who are exhibiting memory loss and tell who will go on to develop full-blown Alzheimer's disease and who won't. "The technology we developed will accelerate the discovery of therapies for [Alzheimer's disease]," lead study author Sulantha Sanjeewa Mathotaarachchi, a software developer at McGill's Translational Neuroimaging Lab, told NBC News MACH in an email.