New system for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s developed

A new computer program has been developed that allows early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease through processed images.

This new system, developed by researchers of the University of Granada, has enhanced successful early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease up to 90 percent, which is an important progress within this area of study.

To test this new automated computer-assisted diagnosis, the researchers of the University of Granada used SPECT and PET tomographies from three different databases.

he first database contains 97 de-identified SPECT images, which were labeled by experts and provided by Dr. Manuel Gomez-Río and the Department of Nuclear Medicine, university hospital Virgen de las Nieves, Granada, Spain.

The second database contains 60 PET images provided by the company PET- Cartuja (Seville).

The third was the largest database, and it had 219 PET images provided by ADNI (United States).

These databases included brain CT scans from aged patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or with normal development patterns.

A series of algorithms were developed, which allowed the identification of brain areas affected by the disease, and helped in distinguishing diseased patients from healthy ones.

The three methods presented in this study attained 90 percent success rate in identifying Alzheimer through CT -both PET and SPECT.

These results were partially published in the journals Information Sciences (2010), Neuroscience Letters (2009) and Electronics Letters (2009).

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