Digital Revolution: Detecting brain disorders in a flash

Magnetic resonance images that reveal illnesses such as Alzheimer's
can now be read in minutes rather than days thanks to a simple Pentium
III processor.

“We can label 500 brains in an hour. That's 10 years of human
work,” says Bruce Fischl, Ph.D., an assistant professor of
radiology at Harvard University and a member of the Ivy League team that
developed the automated process.

Alzheimer's disease is identified through specific structural
irregularities in brain tissue. Manual detection is limited to a handful
of tissues, but the automated analysis can label 37 discreet tissue
types.

When administered to 93 subjects at risk for developing
Alzheimer's, the program was as accurate as the manual method, according
to a report in
Neuron.

The next step is to assemble a comprehensive database of brain
scans that will allow doctors to diagnose neurological diseases on the
spot in new patients. In trials testing Alzheimer's, the accuracy rate
was above 80 percent.