Blood Test for Alzheimer’s Disease Getting Closer…
An experimental blood test was highly accurate at distinguishing people with Alzheimer’s disease from those without it in several studies, boosting hopes that there soon may be a simple way to help diagnose this most common form of dementia.
Developing such a test has been a long-sought goal, and scientists warn that the new approach still needs more validation and is not yet ready for wide use.
But Tuesday’s results suggest they’re on the right track. The testing identified people with Alzheimer’s vs. no dementia or other types of it with accuracy ranging from 89% to 98%.
“That’s pretty good. We’ve never seen that” much precision in previous efforts, said Maria Carrillo, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science officer.
AI To Identify Prostate Cancer With ‘Near-Perfect Accuracy’…
PITTSBURGH — Human error can be charming in an endearing kind of way, but no one appreciates mistakes when it comes to a topic as serious as cancer. On that note, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh developed a new artificial intelligence program with the most accurate record to date when it comes to recognizing prostate cancer.
“Humans are good at recognizing anomalies, but they have their own biases or past experience,” says senior author Dr. Rajiv Dhir, chief pathologist and vice chair of pathology at UPMC Shadyside and professor of biomedical informatics at UPitt, in a release. “Machines are detached from the whole story. There’s definitely an element of standardizing care.”
What separates this AI from the rest of the robotic pack? Dr. Dhir and his team “fed” their program images from over a million parts of tissue slides extracted from prostate cancer patient biopsies. Then, the AI program was tested on 1,600 different slide images collected from 100 suspected prostate cancer patients.