Katharina Buczek
And Mr. M was not confident regarding what physical characteristics were typical for specific animals, either.
For instance, does a giraffe have scales or fur? On top of this, Mr. M was suffering from memory impairment as well.
According to Matthias Schroeter, a researcher at MPI CBS and a consultant psychiatrist, the questions posed by Mr. M are typical in clinical practice.
Primarily, medical teams work to determine the correct diagnosis in such cases in order to ensure that therapy is adapted to each patient and their individual disease.
“However, in addition to Alzheimer’s dementia, which is the best-known neurodegenerative disease and is characterized by impairments in memory, there are very many other diseases that also require a different therapy,” Schroeter explained.
These rare diseases that can occur at an earlier age, which are sometimes referred to as “orphan diseases,” will require specific care from specialized medical centers.
So, in the study, Schroeter and Leonie Lampe, his colleague, utilized emerging machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence (AI) to detect these diseases automatically.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to analyze the patients’ brain structures at the University of Leipzig Medical Center in Germany.
And using this method, the researchers were able to prove that rare forms of dementia can be detected and diagnosed early.
Aside from patients who had Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with memory impairment, the researchers also included numerous other diseases which can be characterized via a change in personality, motor skills, or language.
“Compared to previous studies, we were not only able to identify diseases very well when compared to healthy individuals, but in addition, we were able to identify the specific disease compared to other dementia diseases,” Schroeter revealed.
