WORCESTER, Mass. — Doctors and patients are gaining an edge in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease by catching early warning signs with new screening methods.
From genetic testing to AI-assisted diagnosis tools, new tests could pave for the way for earlier treatment.
“Every family member who gets it, it’s just another blow,” said Lewis Wheeler.
Wheeler’s family has a history of Alzheimer’s disease. Growing up, his grandmother had it before eventually his mother and uncle were diagnosed later in life.
But after his cousin was diagnosed at just 54 years old, he wondered about his own health. His cousin took a genetic test that revealed he had two copies of a gene that increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
When Wheeler took the same test, he found out he had the gene too — but only one copy.
“There’s a tendency to back away from it or deny it,” Wheeler said. “I have an increased risk, but it’s not like my cousin where it’s more dire.”
While medications exist to change the course of the disease, early detection is still ke to their success, though catching it earlier is getting easier than ever.
Dr. Gennady Gelman at UMass Memorial Health is a family physician who is trying a new tool that puts a digital twist on a classic Alzheimer’s test.
Using a tablet and a pen with special sensors to gather patient data, a test from Linus Health walks patients through an exam that asks participants to draw clocks, remember words and more.
Ten hospital systems across the country are trying out the test. If it goes well, doctors hope it could become part of routine checkups for even more patients.
“This is about a two or three minute test,” Dr. Gelman said. “The tablet itself is picking up milliseconds between when you’re writing a clock.”
Once the test is finished, it collects medical data like response times and tremors in a patients’ hand, sending the information to a high-speed computer where machine learning algorithms flag warning signs that were nearly invisible to doctors in the past.
“Even though it seems like a really quick test, there’s a lot of data that we can actually analyze quickly,” Dr. Gelman said.
In addition to speed, Dr. Gelman said the test can also help doctors see the data clearly.
“Clinicians I think sometimes would maybe be a little bit more generous with the answer,” Dr. Gelman said. “We see the patient strugglign and we want to help them. This is much more objective.”
In addition to genetic tests and clinical exams, brain scans are getting better at catching Alzheimer’s disease using new methods unlocked by advances in artificial intelligence and image processing.
Ben Nephew, Ph.D. works with Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and he has spent over two decades studying brain health.
He knows how hard it can be to peer inside the brain.
“MRI scans, brain scans have an immense amount of data,” Nephew said. “Traditional physical methods are not great at analyzing those scans.”
He teamed up with Senbao Lu, a biological data scientist to try a new approach that can handle the vast amount of numerical data that is created by an MRI scan.
“We as humans, we don’t really look at number and make decisions like that,” Lu said. “But machine learning algorithms can.”
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Standing in front of display with various brain scans, Ben Nephew, PH.D. said, “A lot of times you don’t see anything. It’s hard to see anything visually in the data, but there are differences in the image that the machine learning can pick up on.”
Nephew said they were also able to discover differences in how the disease impacts the brains of men and women.
“You could use this for drug development to figure out who the treatment works best for, in addition to clinical decision making. So, the clinician could say, well, this drug seems to work best for you because you’re male or female.”
It’s estimated seven million Americans have Alzheimer’s. That number is expected to grow as the population ages.
The Worcester Polytechnic Team found that artificial intelligence can analyze bran scans for Alzheimer’s with 93% accuracy.
With Alzheimer’s screening improving, Dr. Gelman hopes more patients will be able to catch the disease and treat it early.
The doctors at UMass Memorial Health Care would like to see the tablet-based assessment given to every patient over 65 when they get their annual physical examination.
For Wheeler and his family, it could make all the difference.
“Instead of turning away from it and trying to deny it, if we could go into it and try to address it early, it will help us,” Wheeler said. “And it will help our families.”
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