LONDON (Dispatches) -- An Alzheimer’s Research found that a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning can accurately tell who will go on to develop dementia.
Researchers from the University of Exeter in UK used data from more than 15,300 patients in the U.S. who attended a network of 30 National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center memory clinics in the US. The attendees did not have dementia at the start of the study, though many were experiencing problems with memory or other brain functions.
Within two years of visiting the memory clinic, between 2005 and 2015, one in ten attendees (1,568) received a new diagnosis of dementia . The research found that the machine learning model could predict these new dementia cases with up to 92 per cent accuracy -- and far more accurately than two existing alternative research methods.
The researchers also found for the first time that around eight per cent (130) of the dementia diagnoses appeared to be made in error, as their diagnosis was subsequently reversed. Machine learning models accurately identified more than 80 per cent of these inconsistent diagnoses. Artificial intelligence can not only accurately predict who will be diagnosed with dementia, it also has the potential to improve the accuracy of these diagnoses.