Startup Assists Radiologists in Detecting Dementia

Dementia diagnosis starts with uncertainty — patients or their family members make an appointment after noticing symptoms that suggest something’s wrong. It may take months or years to reach a final diagnosis, as doctors must observe how a patient’s condition progresses over time. Radiologists don’t typically have serial quantitative brain data — calculated measurements of a patient’s brain structures taken at different times — on hand during this process. They rely instead on visual assessments of the scans, rating a patient’s brain atrophy levels on a four or five-point scale. Experts rely on these qualitative scores because even when serial scans are available, it would take radiologists inordinately long to quantify the data, as they have to calculate brain structure volumes by hand.