Robots can spot dementia 10 years earlier
ROBOTS would identify dementia cases up to ten years earlier if used to examine patients’ medical records, research suggests.
Doctors’ notes often show the earliest signs of dementia – from missing appointments to high blood pressure.
But Artificial Intelligence (AI) is much more likely to identifying warning signs.
Researchers at Edinburgh and Plymouth universities found it had an 84 per cent success rate in spotting early indications.
The research holds out the possibility that dementia cases could be diagnosed as much as a decade earlier than at present. That means tens of thousands of patients could get earlier treatment.
Dementia affects 850,000 people in the UK. In many cases, the disease will have been progressing for up to 15 years before it becomes severe enough to be spotted by a GP and diagnosed by a specialist.
The study, published in the BJGP Open online journal, used GP records from 18 practices for 26,483 patients over the age of 65. Dr Javier Escudero, Chancellor’s Fellow in biomedical signal processing at the University of Edinburgh, said: ‘The idea was to check whether a machine-learning based system could use data routinely available at GP practices to identify people who would be at a higher risk of dementia.’
The team created a profile of conditions, diseases and behaviours associated with dementia, including falls and forgetfulness.
Dr Escudero said: ‘We then used machinelearning techniques to try to identify people who appeared to have that profile of dementia but had not received a formal diagnosis.’
The AI scanned each patients’ notes and was ‘triggered’ by potential indicators. The flagged cases were then checked by a GP, with 84 per cent of the checks confirming previously undiagnosed cases of dementia.
Jim Pearson, director of policy and research at Alzheimer Scotland, said: ‘We welcome this interesting research about the role that artificial intelligence may play to help GPs to diagnose dementia.
‘But we need much more research into the causes of dementia.’