General Discussion

AI is accelerating research on complex neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, explained Steven Finkbeiner, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes.

When his team began using AI to analyze images of cells, “one of the very first things that surprised a lot of the biologists in my group was how rich their data might be, and it may contain information that basically we can’t see as humans, or have overlooked,” he said.

His team employed a deep-learning algorithm to try to identify the point at which a cell becomes destined to die — something human scientists have struggled to do, and a key endpoint in understanding neurodegenerative diseases. After being trained with 23,000 examples, the team’s deep-learning network was able to identify changes in the cell nucleus that could predict with high accuracy which cells were destined to die.