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.
