Artworks may aid diagnosis of brain disease

SOME of the most famous artists in history may have left clues to brain disease in their work, scientists have found.

Groundbreaking analysis of the brushstrokes of the likes of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso is shining a light on how degenerative illness can be spotted years before other life-changing symptoms come to the fore.

Experts at Maynooth University in Ireland and Liverpool University believe the insights may lead to new research that could ultimately help diagnose the early stages of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Some 2,092 paintings by seven artists were digitally stripped to black and white in an attempt to uncover changing patterns and structures in the works and draw a true picture of their health.

Professor Ronan Reilly, from the Department of Computer Science at Maynooth University, ran tests using non-traditional mathematics, similar to those used to study snowflakes or spot forged artworks attributed to the renowned abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.

“This data suggests that it could be possible to identify changes in the structure of a painting many years before the diagnosis of a neurological disorder,” he said.

The work of Dali and Norval Morrisseau, who are believed to have suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and James Brooks and Willem De Kooning, who had Alzheimer’s, was analysed alongside paintings by Picasso, Marc Chagall and Claude Monet, who suffered no degenerative brain illness.

The decoding revealed artistic structures used by those with brain disease changed as they got older, becoming less complex.